57% increase in ten years

While waiting to see if 2024 brings a slowdown in the property market, the province of Malaga led the escalation of house prices in Spain in 2023 (including both new and second hand), according to the valuation data published by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda.

Malaga and the Balearic Islands saw an increase of nearly 10 per cent in 2023 alone despite a drop in the number of sales transactions caused by the successive interest rate rises applied by the European Central Bank (ECB).

Malaga is the sixth most expensive province in Spain after Madrid, the Balearic Islands, Guipúzcoa and Barcelona. In 2022 the province exceeded the average of €2,000 per metre for the first time since 2009 and now has the highest prices since the peak of the property bubble, when it reached an average of €2,348 at the beginning of 2008. That bubble burst abruptly in the summer of the same year following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States, which triggered a global economic crisis.

The increase in the value of housing in recent years is, in part, down to the long economic crisis that followed the bursting of the bubble: prices fell in Malaga to a low of around €1,450 in 2013 and 2014. Compared to ten years ago therefore, the value of housing in the province has risen by 57 per cent.