Malaga province sits in fourth place in Spain in terms of value of its real estate assets

Malaga is one of the most expensive provinces in Spain to buy or rent a property. Moreover, it is also one of the areas of the country where the value of its real estate assets is highest, which is not only made up of the residential market (homes), but of all buildings, from office space to property used for religious purposes.

The Catastro, a body attached to the Ministry of Finance, has in its database the entire inventory of real estate in all Spanish provinces, which includes warehouses, car parks, commercial premises, cultural facilities, bars and restaurants, factories, sports facilities, offices, unique buildings, as well as buildings for religious use, in addition to vacant land. Well, the cadastral value of the total of those located in the province of Malaga amounts to just over 115.35 billion euros. It should be noted at this point that the cadastral value differs from the market value - it is usually lower than the market value - and that it is used as a reference for the payment of certain taxes applied to real estate, above all the property tax (IBI), which is managed by the municipality where the real estate is located.

Malaga's figure is only exceeded by three provinces in the country: Madrid with more than 517 billion euros in real estate assets, Barcelona with just over 330.7 billion euros and Valencia at over 120.2 billion euros. In total, the value of Spanish real estate assets is close to 2.4 trillion euros, which means that it exceeds Spanish GDP, (gross domestic product: the value of all goods and services produced in a year by the national economy), which in the 2023 financial year stood at 1.4 trillion euros.

Just behind Malaga is Alicante, where the total value of the real estate stock is close to 94 billion euros, although the latter province has over two million real estate assets recorded on the catastro, a figure higher than the 1.5 million properties and plots of land logged for Malaga.

So Malaga is the fourth Spanish province in terms of cadastral property value and the fifth in terms of number of properties. The Balearic Islands, another Spanish territory that always appears among those with the most expensive residential stock, has a property portfolio with a value of less than 80 billion euros, while its number of properties does not reach one million. The archipelago is therefore in sixth place in the ranking in terms of the value of its bricks-and-mortar. Seville, for its part, is in seventh place: its 1.3 million properties have a combined cadastral value of 73.11 billion euros.

Among the ten provinces with the most valuable real estate assets there is another Andalusian province: Cadiz, with over 53 billion euros. In fact, the region of Andalucía sits in third place on the regional ranking with a total value of 391.6 billion euros, only behind Madrid and Catalonia (almost 434 billion).

How are the 1.5 million real estate assets in Malaga province distributed? The bulk of the 'brick' in this land is residential. There are more than 950,000 homes, making it the fifth Spanish province with the most houses. Still, in terms of total value, at 81.8 billion euros, it ranks third only behind Madrid and Barcelona. Malaga is the fourth province in the country when the ranking is ordered by the average cadastral value per property: the 88,869 euros average in Malaga are only exceeded by the 111,679 euros in Madrid, 88,541 euros in Barcelona and 86,454 euros in the Balearic Islands.

According to figures from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda, Malaga is the sixth most expensive province for housing, behind Madrid, the Balearic Islands, Guipúzcoa, Barcelona and Vizcaya. This organisation takes appraisal values as a reference and offers the data in euros per square metre.

The second most abundant real estate assets in Malaga are warehouses and car parks. The cadastre does not distinguish between storage and parking or garages, but lists them as an aggregated category. In the province in total there are around 384,000 between the two types, making Malaga third in Spain in terms of the number of these assets. Together they are valued at around 3.7 billion euros, meaning an average value per property of approximately 9,500 euros, a figure that places Malaga lower down the ranking than the places it usually occupies. Besides Madrid, Barcelona and the Balearic Islands, Zaragoza, Girona, Segovia and Las Palmas are provinces where the average garage or warehouse has a cadastral value of over 10,000 euros.

After housing and garages, the most abundant property type is made up of shops, which number around 70,500, with a total cadastral value of more than 7.5 billion euros and an average unit value of just over 106,800 euros. Malaga, with these figures, is in fifth place for the provinces with the most premises, but fourth when the ordering criterion is their total cadastral value. However, it drops again when the ranking is ordered by average value, which is close to 107,000 euros per premises in Malaga, well below the 208,000 euros exceeded in Madrid or the 124,000 euros surpassed in Barcelona. In this case too their value is below the Spanish average, which is around 112,000 euros.

The province of Malaga also has, according to the national cadastre, around 57,000 vacant plots with an average value of over 125,000 euros, which places it, in this case, among the provinces with the most valuable land in the country. In fact, it is in the top three, only behind Madrid (205,000 euros on average) and Ceuta (around 160,000, on average).

Industrial assets exceed 24,000 in total, but this is a figure that places it at the bottom of the list. There are only eleven provinces in Spain with fewer strictly industrial spaces than Malaga. That said, the average cadastral value of each factory space (above 150,000 euros) places the province in fourth position, only behind Madrid (328,762 euros), Barcelona (311,182 euros) and Girona (154,099 euros), and ahead of Cadiz (149,591 euros). Few factories yes, but valuable, is how it could be summed up.

Offices and places dedicated to leisure or hospitality tie in their quantity in Malaga, with close to 10,000 assets in each of these two categories. However, their cadastral value differs significantly. The average value of premises dedicated to the hotel and restaurant trade in the province is over 458,000 euros, while the average value of a typical office is just over 170,000 euros, according to the cadastre.

Malaga, with its 9,138 premises dedicated to the hotel or leisure industry, is the fifth province with the highest number of this type of property, only behind other parts of the country also characterised by the importance of tourism in their economic structure (Las Palmas, the Balearic Islands and Santa Cruz de Tenerife), as well as Madrid.

The Costa del Sol province, despite the shortages pointed out on many occasions for this real estate asset, also stands out for the number of offices registered: with 9,833 it is in fifth place for the most properties of this type after Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville, and also ahead of Alicante.

Other types of buildings are less important in Malaga, as there are just over 5,300 sports facilities, and cultural and health facilities are around 1,000. There are approximately 500 unique and religious buildings, although their average value is very high, at 1.25 million and more than half a million euros respectively. These are, as one might easily guess, the most valuable properties of all those that make up the property inventory in the province, second only to cultural assets (1.5 million euros on average per building in Malaga).