Malaga property market slows as sales drop by 28%

Property sales in Malaga dropped by 28% in May compared to the same month last year, new data shows.

It comes after April registered the best month for the number of sales and purchases of flats since 2007 with 3,325 transactions in Malaga, an increase of 36.3% compared to a year earlier. But just 2,584 transactions were recorded in May, the lowest figure for a month of May since 2021, when there were 2,452, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).

A similar trend was also recorded nationally with just over 44,000 properties sold, the lowest figure for May since the pandemic - a decrease of 21.5% year-on-year compared to almost 56,100 in May 2023. In Andalucía, the 8,815 sales and purchases in May are almost 25% less than in the same period of the previous year.

In the whole of 2023, the number of sales and purchases in Malaga fell by more than 17% compared to a year earlier. And in 2024, far from a recovery, transactions continue to fall. In the year to date, between January and May, 13,940 transactions have been registered in the province, a drop of 9.2% compared to the more than 15,300 in the same period last year.

In Spain the just under 250,000 transactions registered so far are 4.15% less than the some 260,000 registered at this time last year. And in Andalucía the 49,068 transactions in the first five months of 2024 are 7.35% less than the almost 53,000 in the same period last year.

Malaga is the fifth Spanish province with the highest number of property sales, after Madrid (5,046 sales in May); Barcelona (4,329); Alicante (3,913); and Valencia (2,621), the data shows. Although, among these provinces, there is only one that recorded a greater drop in property sales: Valencia, where sales from one year to the next decreased 29%.

Real estate activity in Malaga in May is also more intense than that recorded in entire regions, with the exception of Andalucía, Valencia, Catalonia and Madrid. More homes were sold in the province than in Castilla y León (2,065 in May), Castilla-La Mancha (1,829); or the Basque Country (1,813).

The Malaga property market accounts for 30% of all the activity recorded in the Andalusian market: of the 8,815 sales and purchases registered in the region, 2,584 took place on land in Malaga, compared to 1,464 operations in Seville and 1,152 in Cadiz, the two provinces that follow in the ranking.