The price of housing continued to rise in Spain for the eighth consecutive year.
According to the latest data from the Housing Price Index (HPI) from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), in 2021 the Spanish housing market registered an average increase of 3.7%, which is 1.6 percentage points more than in 2020 (average 2.1%).
This strong rise accelerated at the end of the year, as data from the last quarter of 2021 show. Between October and December, buying a house was on average 6.4% more expensive than in the same period of the previous year, which represents the highest rise since the beginning of 2019.
And it seems that prices are far from peaking. On Wednesday, Spanish real estate market experts warned that the war in Ukraine would probably accelerate the rise in prices even more, because more and more investors will see housing as a refuge value in times of skyrocketing inflation.
The rise in prices in the last quarter of the year was fairly homogeneous for the entire market, although a few tenths higher among second-hand housing (6.4%) than among new builds (6.1%).
Largest regional increases
On an annual average, in 2021 new-build housing became 4.6% more expensive, while second-hand housing prices rose by 3.6%, according to the INE.
By region, the highest annual average price increases were recorded in the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Cantabria and Murcia, all with increases of more than 5%.
The smallest increases occurred in the Basque Country (+2.1%), Extremadura (+2.3%) and Castilla-La Mancha (+2.4%).
