Home buyers are increasingly looking for cooler areas
Home sales, including those to foreigners, are growing most in the cooler areas of Spain.
BarcelonaTemperature is now a relevant factor when choosing where to buy a home. At least in Spain, where sales grew most strongly last year in the cooler areas of the country. While the northwestern provinces of the Iberian Peninsula saw their transactions increase by between 15% and 25% last year, traditional tourist areas, warmer and closer to the beach, experienced a milder increase in demand. This is one of the conclusions of the latest real estate sector report published this Monday by CaixaBank Research.
The same study also notes an increase in demand in more peripheral areas, derived from the rising cost of housing in larger cities. "Furthermore, the sharp rise in housing prices in large cities is causing a shift in housing demand to more affordable peripheral areas, municipalities where housing prices are expected to grow vigorously in 2025," states the sector report from CaixaBank's research department.
The impact of the temperature factor is not new in housing. An analysis of tourist spending, based on card payments at CaixaBank POS terminals, shows that the coolest municipalities in Spain had the fastest growth in tourist spending between the high seasons of 2019 and 2023, which, according to this research department, highlights the rise of green tourism and harassment. This was the prelude to a 2024 in which the provinces with lower average temperatures during last year's summer recorded greater growth in sales. "It can be seen that the cooler areas of Spain, marked with a green circle, are experiencing higher growth in sales than the traditionally hotter and more touristy provinces (red circle) or the rest. This trend shows the great appeal that the northwest of the peninsula is gaining as a tourist destination, as a result of the report.
Foreigners are also jumping on the bandwagon.
This trend is also evident in home purchases and sales by foreigners, who are showing greater interest in these regions, although their presence is lower than the national average (14.6%). According to data from the Association of Registrars, home purchases by foreigners in Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, and the Basque Country, which represented only 1.8% of total sales in the fourth quarter of 2020, reached 3.9% in the last three months of last year. Among these four regions, the greatest international interest is concentrated in Asturias, where purchases by foreigners represent 5.8% of the total, followed by the Basque Country (3.7%), Cantabria (3.6%), and Galicia (2.2%).
