ARCHIVED - Registrars report 265 per cent increase in Murcia property sales during May

The figures also show an 11.5 per cent rise in comparison with pre-pandemic data from 2019

Figures published on Monday by Spain’s property registrars indicate that the national property market has returned to the level of activity which was being reported prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, with the number of sales and purchases registered during May of this year being just 1.1 per cent lower than in the same month in 2019 but 145 per cent higher than in May 2020.

This unusual statistic is due, of course, to the fact that it was not until May last year that Spain began to emerge from the initial coronavirus lockdown, but even so the data provide a welcome indication that the market is returning to pre-pandemic levels of activity.

For those in Murcia it is also encouraging to note that the year-on-year comparison shows an increase of 265 per cent, the highest in any of Spain’s regions!

That may be relatively meaningless due to the distortion of the statistics during the pandemic, but Murcia is also among the leading performers in terms of the comparison with the May 2019 figures, showing an increase of 11.5 per cent to 3,326 transactions.

National data

According to the registrars, a total of 92,987 transactions were registered during the month, with the figures higher than in May 2019 in six of Spain’s 17 regions, the sharpest rises being reported in Aragón (14.1 per cent) and the Region of Murcia (11.5 per cent). At the other end of the scale are falls of 20.2 per cent in the Canaries and 15.8 per cent in the Balearics, with the islands presumably affected by the continuing travel disruptions this spring as they rely on holiday home sales for a lot of their market activity.

Mortgage activity

The registrars also report a return to “normal” in terms of the number of mortgage loans registered, the total of 45,404 in May representing a drop of a mere 3.8 per cent in comparison with two years previously. In this instance the most significant increases in the 2019-2021 comparison are reported in Cantabria (+26.9 per cent) and Murcia (+24.2 per cent) while again the Balearics and the Canaries foot the table with falls of 33.6 per cent and 19.1 per cent respectively.