Owners of more than five properties in Malaga province triple in 20 years
Recently updated the Spanish cadastre statistics show that the fastest growing are the owners of between five and ten assets
The number of property owners with several assets to their name is increasing. Is it myth or reality? Government data sheds some light on the issue. The recently updated statistics show how the number of owners of urban real estate in the province of Malaga has evolved since 2006 - the earliest year in the study, although data at the national level only goes back to 2015.
Two decades ago, the total number of urban property owners - alone or shared - in the province was 761,600. Now, in 2025, there are almost 1.2 million. The number of owners has therefore grown by 57.4%.
Most of them, both then and now, own only one property. In 2006, of the 761,600 owners, 72.5% - or more than 551,000 - owned one property. Now, the share of single property owners has fallen to 57.3% of the total: just over 687,200 of the nearly 1.2 million. In fact, while the number of owners as a whole has grown by 57% over the last two decades, the number of owners with a single urban property has increased by only 24.5%.
If the owners of a single property have grown by less than half the total rate of growth of owners, this means that those who have increased the most are those who own more than one flat, house, premises or garage. Those with two properties have doubled in the last 20 years, from around 127,000 in 2006 to 258,000 in 2025. Owners of three assets have grown even more, from 45,352 to around 120,500 in the province over the same period - an increase of 165%.
What is even more striking is what has happened with the owners of five or more urban properties - in 2006, there were 20,556, now there are more than 75,800, which means that they have more than tripled, although there are a lot of specific cases to consider.
To begin with, the owners of more than 50 assets have decreased: there were 518 in total in the province 20 years ago; today there are 510, although there were almost 800 in 2010 and 2015. A circumstance suggested by head of alternative investments at Aire Partners Patricio Palomar may have played a role here: since the statistics include not only individuals but also companies and investment funds, in light of stricter regulations for large property holders, some entities have been setting up subsidiaries and affiliates in order to distribute and reduce the official number of properties they own.
This is consistent with the government's property cadastre data. Owners of five properties in the province have increased by 253%, to 27,137. At the same time, those with between six and ten properties have shot up by 319%, to over 39,000. Meanwhile, owners of between 11 and 25 properties have grown by 225% to more than 8,100. The number of owners of between 26 and 50 properties has evolved more moderately, rising from 546 to 989.
What's happening in the country
Is Malaga exceptional or is this trend in line with what may be happening in Spain in general? The cadastre does not have as extensive a history for the country as a whole as for the province. The oldest national data is from 2015, but the last decade already seems sufficiently illustrative. The total number of urban property owners has grown by just over 4%, from 24.97 to 26 million, while owners of more than five have increased by 29%, to 2.18 million. As in the province of Malaga, the number of owners of more than 50 properties has fallen (from 16,086 to 13,822), while that of those with between 26 and 50 has risen slightly from 28,973 to 30,662.
