The Spanish property market appears to be turning a corner for the better at the moment, a lot of which is down to an increase in foreign investment.
Spain was recently revealed as the number one searched for destination for prospective British property buyers, with 28 per cent of Britons’ online overseas property searches being for property in Spain.

• On top of that, overall interest in Spanish property from overseas investors increased by 17 per cent in 2012; a level it had not been at since 2004.

• Alicante and Malaga provinces have benefited the most from this surge in investment, with the two coastal resorts selling more properties to foreign investors in the first quarter of 2013 than any other province in Spain. Both of these provinces just happen to be located in two areas that already share a famous love-affair with foreigners – the Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol; two regions of Spain consistently linked to tourism.

• In May of this year it was revealed that the Valencian Community – where the Costa Blanca is situated – saw an increase in international visitors for the seventh consecutive month with a rise of 17.4 per cent.

• Meanwhile on the Costa del Sol, with the luxury resort Marbella in its arsenal, tourism in the same period had a year-on-year increase of 5.7 per cent with 780,000 visitors descending on the area.

• As reported on Tumbit, the website dedicated to Spanish legal, financial and procedural information, these figures contributed to a total increase of 9.3 per cent in visitor numbers for May 2013 with British, Scandinavian and Dutch tourists being particularly big contributors. It could be that the tourism industry provides a big helping hand for Spain’s property market when it’s doing well, after all, you need visitors there in the first place if they are to be enticed into making their stay a more permanent fixture sometime in the future.

• The figures themselves suggest there could be something in this; take the Costa del Sol for example. Its tourism figures, as touched on earlier in this article, coincides with non-Spanish nationals accounting for 45 per cent of the buyers’ market this year in that region.

• Demographics might shed some light on this theory as well. Traditionally, British buyers swamped the country’s tourism and property markets, but now you have Germans, Swedes, Russians and Middle Easterns increasingly visiting Spain for vacation purposes – and this is beginning to reflect in the property market too.

• This positive news comes at a time when June proved to be another record breaking month for the country’s tourism industry, while at the same time Spain’s Economy Minister Luis de Guindos announcing the country is out of recession and will continue to grow out of it as the year progresses.

Article by David Johns