Foreign home fever on the Med: Buyers from abroad outstrip 2019 numbers

NON-SPANISH buyers are snapping up 133 homes a day in the Comunidad Valenciana, and sales shot up by 50% of pre-pandemic figures this spring.

According to data from the Valencia College of Notaries, the property market in the three east-coast provinces of Alicante, Castellón and Valencia not only bounced back in the second quarter of 2022, but far surpassed the number of homes sold during the same three months of 2019, in terms of foreign nationals.

Househunters with citizenship of countries other than Spain now account for well over a third of all transactions in the Mediterranean region – 37.25% of the total.

And in the province of Alicante, the coast of which is known in the tourism trade as the Costa Blanca, over half of all homebuyers are originally from abroad.

The vast majority of buyers not from Spain are from the Americas and other parts of Europe, and they account for 40% in Valencia city and 51.88% in the province of Alicante.

Investors, home-workers and 'to spend two or three months of the year in'

Spokesman for the College of Estate Agents (API) in Valencia, Vicente Díez, says foreign buyer growth is 'very significant indeed'.

Not all of them are retirees seeking a place in the sun – a high number are of working age, with jobs that are not location-specific.

Sometimes referred to as 'digital nomads', the number of remote workers across Europe has soared since the pandemic, when lockdowns meant that, other than those in emergency or essential services, the only people who could work at all were those whose jobs could be done from home.

Not having to worry about where they live in relation to their place of employment means workers are tending to relocate to where they actually want to live, Díez says.

“Just like what happened with Spanish nationals and existing Spanish residents who, after lockdown, started looking for larger homes with more land and outside space, foreigners see Spain and the Comunidad Valenciana as an idyllic destination,” he explains.”

“As soon as restrictions on movement were dropped and the pandemic had passed, they threw themselves into buying over here.

“I've had foreign clients who've bought three apartments in the Valencia area purely as an investment, because their prices were much lower than in their home countries.”

Díez says non-Spanish buyers are tending to 'move to the region to live' if they are able to work remotely, to spend two or three months a year there – 'especially the Italians and the French' – and 'as an investment to rent the property out'.

Remote working boosts east-coast Spain's property market

His colleague, Fernando Muro de Zaro, says the recent homebuying fever among non-Spanish nationals is 'partly due to pent-up demand' among Europeans who were unable to travel during the pandemic, and 'partly due to the rise in remote working'.

“In Europe, working from home has continued beyond the pandemic – more so than in Spain – and many people are considering moving to the Comunidad Valenciana,” Muro de Zaro reveals.

“We've noticed a lot of estate agency activity in Dénia and Jávea (northern Alicante province) and in Valencia city.

“In the latter, they tend to be very solvent customers who, in many cases, don't need a mortgage; they're tending to buy residential property valued at between €200,000 and €250,000, and many do so as an investment.

“Most buyers are European, east and south-east Asian, and from the Americas, mainly the USA, although we've had a handful of customers originally from Ukraine.”

Costa Blanca: British buyers are biggest market

The College of Notaries says soaring foreign buyer numbers are 'particularly noticeable' on the Costa Blanca.

Here, a total of 8,747 homes were bought by non-Spaniards between April and June 2022 inclusive, compared with 6,031 in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.

The main nationality of buyer in the province of Alicante is British, with 2,372 UK citizens acquiring homes there between January and June 2022, followed by Belgians, who scooped up 1,490; Dutch, who purchased 1,412; German, with 1,408 properties bought, and Swiss, with 1,176.

Russian nationals bought 508 residential properties in the province of Alicante in the first half of this year.

At the higher end of the market, the College of Notaries says Brits who have the means are 'willing to spend upwards of €700,000 for a villa in Dénia, Jávea, Altea or Moraira' – the latter being the beach neighbourhood of the town of Teulada-Moraira – as long as it is on or near the coast, with a large garden and an outdoor swimming pool.

Their figures show that buyers from Britain with less available to spend are more likely to be attracted by the high number of lower-priced properties in the south of the province, such as on urbanisations in Torrevieja, Orihuela and Rojales.

Romanians and Moroccans lead Valencia and Castellón sales

Brits are a much smaller market in the province of Valencia – 235 have acquired homes in the first half of the year – outstripped by the Moroccans (325), Italians (377), and French (384).

The nationality most likely to purchase a home in the province of Valencia – other than Spanish – is Romanian, with 455 bought between January and June.

Romanians are also the largest foreign homebuyer market in the more sparsely-inhabited, less-touristy and quieter province of Castellón, having purchased 392 residential properties there in the first six months of the year, with Moroccans being second, buying 203 homes.