Malaga residents live on tenterhooks since record housing prices

Almost every resident of Malaga has a story about the struggles of finding the flat they own or rent: sleepless nights, stress, frustration and defeat. With housing prices that reach a new record every year, they usually end up accepting that they have to either move further away from the city or increase their budget.

SUR introduces readers to Luciano, Paulina and Álvaro, who share their stories. As different as they might seem, they share a common hardship and an understanding that prices are exorbitant.

These are all stories that depict the crisis in Malaga, where prices have doubled in just 12 years. Real estate platform Tecnocasa confirms many families' fear: "a household with average income cannot access an average mortgage".

Guardia Civil officer Álvaro Marín Juárez has been dreaming of returning to his family in Malaga. Although he has been stationed in Navarre for five years, he says that finding work in his native Costa del Sol is not a problem. "There are jobs, there are vacancies, the problem is housing," he says.

He had been looking for a home in Malaga for a while. His initial budget was between 200,000 and 250,000 euros, but he soon realised that supply within this bracket in Malaga city consists of flats in a bad state that would cost him a lot to renovate.

He expanded his search and started looking for a home in nearby towns: Cártama or Alhaurín in the west; Casabermeja in the north; or Torre del Mar in the east. All of these municipalities, however, hide other problems: weak water supply, old offer or even higher house prices.

When Álvaro redirected his search back to Malaga city, he became his own "real estate agent" - a parallel job that used up all his time. He would check all nine platforms and apps he had on his phone to consistently refresh the search. He had a schedule of visits, but he would often not even get to carry them out because someone else would buy or reserve the flat before him.

"Supply was little, bad and expensive, but I didn't have time to even check it out," he says. Many vendors would set prices that didn't match the area, so Álvaro would ask them to at least give him an explanation. "The owners didn't listen to reason. They would tell me that they wanted that money and that they were in no hurry to sell," he says.

Finally, a friend of his told him about the new development in Distrito Zeta. Álvaro ended up buying a flat for 380,000 euros, including taxes, instead of his initial maximum budget of 250,000 euros.

Álvaro is still waiting for the building to be ready so that he could move there in 2027. Although he doesn't like to think about the mortgage he will have to pay, the stability of his job allows him to breathe.

Paulina Novillo and Luciano Simó are 37 years old. They moved to Malaga from Argentina in 2023 because of the deteriorating economic situation in their country, growing insecurity and their desire to give their nine-year-old daughter a better future.

For the first two years they lived renting in the city centre. Their search for a place of their own started in 2025, with an initial budget of 230,000 euros. The family quickly realised that there was no offer in the centre for that price. They had already built their life there and they didn't want to disrupting their daughter's routine by moving again and changing her school.

The solution was to bump the budget to 340,000 euros. As a family, they also needed a garage and buildings in the city centre rarely offer that, so they resorted to expanding their search radius.

Now they live in Alhaurín de la Torre and they do four trips every day to drop off and pick up their daughter from school. Luckily, they both work from home in the tech industry, but they are still testing this transition period.

Paulina remembers the eight months they spent looking for a flat as "very stressful". "The flats were going very quickly. We wasted a lot of time on visits, which were also outside Malaga and made our life very complicated," she says. They do not rule out moving again.

For 36-year-old Marina Benítez, the question is whether to move to her partner's village to save money and eventually buy a house or look for a rented flat. The contract for the one they currently live in is expiring.

"We are considering buying it, but it is a third-floor flat with no lift. It is in a building from the 60s and they are asking 210,000 for it. In any case, there is already someone who has reserved it even without having visited it. These things remind me of what I see in documentaries about the housing problem in New York, but Malaga is not even a big European capital," Marina says.

Marina sometimes regrets not having bought a house she saw with her partner before the pandemic. They did not sign the contract, because the roof collapsed.

Marina acknowledges that, if you don't have family support or if you haven't started working at a very young age, from the age of 18, and haven't been fortunate enough to have a stable and well-paid job, it is impossible to buy a house in Malaga. "We could have bought that house... but how would we have paid for the renovation?" she asks.

Marina is not as fortunate as the previous two families because she became unemployed in December and is now waiting to see if she will get the job she has applied for.

"We can't save up with the salaries we have," 50-year-old Sergio Follana says. He works as a caretaker at a Supeco shop and his salary is around 1,200 euros. His partner, 38, is a cashier, but she works half-time because her son is diagnosed with autism and requires special care.

"We have no one to help us," Sergio says. "With one and a half salarie,s we can't save for a down payment on a house, for the 20 per cent that the bank won't finance," he says.

Their 800-euro rent and the additional bills make it impossible for them to put money aside. As he says, they don't live a life of luxury and they simply spend their money on daily expenses.

Sergio acknowledges that their landlord is being reasonable with the rent, given how prices are going up in other Rincón de la Victoria homes. The mortgage, however, could be even lower than their rent.

They almost bought a house once, but they didn't have a guarantor. "It seems that you can't buy a house with an average salary," Sergio states. Not when "all that is built in Rincón de la Victoria are luxury villas and no affordable and subsidised homes".