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Cristina Vallejo
Malaga
Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Malaga is the sixth most expensive province in terms of the price per square metre of property for sale, according to government statistics, standing at 2,400 euros behind only Madrid, the Balearic Islands, Guipúzcoa, Barcelona and Vizcaya. But, in the case of the price of land available for development, the Costa del Sol province moves even higher in the national ranking. According to the latest data available from the national ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda, the 334.20 euros per square metre that urban plots of land cost in this province place it in second position only behind the 360.10 euros asking price in the Balearic Islands.
Curiously, while house prices have reached record levels in Malaga, well above the levels reached in 2008 before the housing bubble popped, land prices are still below the 374.2 euros per square metre that they were in the third quarter of 2009 when they were at their highest.
Those 374.20 euros per square metre that the economic crisis of nearly three decades ago reached for land in Malaga were brought down to 121.1 euros when it reached its most recent lows at the beginning of the 2013 financial year. This means that, in little more than a decade, the value of land in Malaga province has multiplied almost threefold (an increase of 176%). Meanwhile, since the lows the price per square metre of new and used housing has increased by 66% from 1,450 euros per square metre in 2013 to the current 2,400 euros per square metre. Nevertheless, bear in mind that the movement in land prices is much more volatile and more sensitive to one-off transactions that may take place, because the number of transactions is much lower than for individual housing.
176% is the rise in the price of land in Malaga
from the lows it reached in 2013 after the real estate bubble burst in 2008. It is worth noting that movement in land values is highly volatile and subject to one-off transactions that can distort the average.
In contrast to what has happened in Malaga, the average price of land in Spain as a whole has risen by only 18% compared to the lowest levels following the 2008 crash which it reached in 2014. That average price currently stands at 167.4 euros per square metre from around 141 euros at the beginning of 2014.
The average value of land in the country as a whole had peaked at around 285 euros back in 2008. In contrast to Malaga, which was not affected by the pandemic in terms of land prices at least - in Spain as a whole the price of plots of land in 2021 again hit the 2014 lows, reaching 136 euros immediately after the economic standstill caused by the outbreak of Covid-19.
Be that as it may, the price of development land in Malaga is not only the second most expensive in Spain after the Balearic Islands and ahead of Madrid (313 euros per square metre) or Vizcaya (302.20 euros), but it is also double the Spanish average (167.40 euros) at more than 334 euros.
The average price of urban land in Andalucía, meanwhile, stands at 188 euros. It is therefore slightly above the Spanish average. After Malaga, the second Andalusian province with the most expensive land prices is Cadiz, where it is close to 200 euros per square metre. In Seville the value of buildable land is slightly below the Spanish average (163.70 euros). At the other end of the scale is Huelva, the province with the cheapest urban land in Andalucía at under 100 euros.
As mentioned before, the land prices market is more volatile than that of housing. Thus, for example, during the year 2023 the price oscillated in Malaga province between 250 and 360 euros per square metre. At that level - and therefore above the current figure - it has reached its most recent maximum. It hit that max in the third quarter of last year, a figure from which it fell back in the last quarter of the same year. The 334.20 achieved in the first quarter of 2024 is 28.8% above the closing levels of 2023 and almost 33% above the figure recorded 12 months earlier. These variations mean that those recorded in Spain as a whole pale beside these levels. To be specific, the average rise in the price of urban land in the whole of Spain is limited to 8.3% quarter-on-quarter and 13% year-on-year. In Andalucía the increase is 23.5% quarter-on-quarter and 11.4% year-on-year.
If the price of land in Malaga stands out compared to the figures reached by other areas of Spain, the province also stands out in the number of sales and purchases of land, although less so. Thus, during the first quarter of 2024 - the latest data available - 223 land transactions were carried out in Malaga, making it the eighth most active market in the country behind Barcelona, which leads the ranking with 446, Toledo, Seville, Girona, Madrid, Valencia and Zaragoza.
In any case, Andalucía is the Spanish region in which most deals were done between January and March of this year, with 1,209, followed by the 1,019 recorded in Catalonia.
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