Valencia Property Blog

For the last few years this report has opened the same way. More demand, less supply, more demand, less supply and so on. This year it's different, not radically so but different all the same. This year it opens differently because for the first time since Covid the pattern has not exactly broken but at least slowed down and in one aspect has changed direction.

The headlines are that sales are slower, at least in the last couple of months, and there is a little more choice than there was. Banks and valuers have got into the habit of taking their time, an aspect we wrote about a fortnight ago in Bloody Banks and Valuations. Prices meanwhile have carried on going up regardless (In a sort of Sid James tribute) which is the part that confuses those who assume a slowdown in sales means a fall in prices. It doesn't and we will get to why later. But just before we start...

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As usual this report is built on our own sales rather than on somebody else's press release but we have looked as always at what is happening in the market using information taken from various sources including Asicval, the Valencian estate agents association, notary and registry information and press reports. As always we look at prices, locations, nationalities, types of property, financing from our own clients and what we think might happen in the rest of the year. For those of you who like your data in graphic format take a look here.

Sales

At this point last year we had done 14% more sales than this year so we are down on the same period. Last year was a record year. Lead times mean that we don't have the exact information as to when completions took place last year compared with this year but that percentage is mostly right. There is no sense dressing it up as something it isn't so there you go. It also puts us more or less where the rest of the market is as the Asicval barometer for the first quarter had agency transactions across the Valencian Community down 4.6%, with around 40% of member agencies reporting falls of between 5% and 25%. We are doing what others are too which is logical as we are working in the same market but our client base doesn't come from the same field so there is perhaps some discrepancy.

Now the part that goes against the narrative. Our average sale price is €432,527 against €404,000 for the whole of 2025, up 7.1%. The median price has gone from €360,000 to €390,000, up 8.3%. Compare the first seven months of this year against the first seven months of last year and the gap is wider still, with the average up 14.5% and the median up 11.4%. This reflects almost to the percentage point the reports of price rises in the Valencian community overall.

Both the mean and the median are worth knowing as I'm a bit of a maths geek but also it's worth saying why we give you the two. The average (Mean) tells you what is going through the business and can be affected by a single large villa. After all if you, me and Elon Musk are in the same room our mean net worth is astronomical but you and me still don't feel rich and he continues to be an utter melon. The median tells you what the middle of our sales range actually looks like. When only the mean moves you should have doubts as the sample size isn't the whole market. When both move by roughly the same amount, as they have this year and for the last few years, then the figures back up the trend.

So, what has happened is a change in the shape of the sales rather than a uniform surge. Sales above €600,000 have gone from 16% of last year's total to 22% of this year's, and when compared against the first half of last year, when they were 9%, the change is quite dramatic to be honest. Sales under €250,000 have dropped from 22% to 19%. The middle has held at around a third of everything we do between €250,000 and €400,000. The number of sales has fallen slightly but the sales are bigger ones as you can see below in the graph. The chart below sets it out. The pattern is the same one most agencies in Valencia are describing, the bottom of the market is chilling while the top, like the temperature, gets hotter.

Locations

62% of our sales this year have been in the city of Valencia and 38% outside it. If we add in Mislata and Xirivella which are Valencia in everything except the paperwork then that rises to 68% in the city.

Last year the equivalent figures were 71% in the whole year and 76% in the first half so the city share has come down by nine points. That is a reversal of previous years because for the last two years running this section reported the opposite, more sales in the city, fewer outside. More of our clients have taken the trade off the towns offer which is more house and more outside space with a plot in exchange for a metro ride, a bus trip or a short car journey into the city when required.

What is more interesting is what happened to the prices in each area. Last year our city sales averaged €378,000 with a median of €345,000, while sales outside the city averaged €466,706 with a median of €482,500. Going out of town meant spending more, because the people going out of town were buying villas. This year the city average is €443,739 with a median of €395,000, and outside it is €414,107. The two have crossed over and there is a reason for this.

However, there is a warning about that outside figure before anyone quotes it at me. The median outside the city this year is €277,000, a long way below the €414,107 mean average. This is because our out of town sales fall into two quite separate groups with almost nothing in between. There is a set of inland purchases up to €255,000 in places like Godelleta, Lliria and Paterna, and then there is a set of large houses between €680,000 and €850,000 in L'Eliana, Ribarroja and San Antonio with very little in the mid range. If you are looking outside the city, the market you are shopping in depends entirely on which of those two you are in, and any single average price for the towns is useless as a guide. That includes ours. Each town and location has its own market factors. You won't find any houses for sale in L'Eliana for 250k and any property further inland, let's say Turis for example, will only be above 600k if it's an absolute mansion with a huge amount of land.

The usual suspects turned up again in our sales figures but there are new places too. L'Eliana, Godelleta, Denia, Gandia, Ribarroja, Mislata, Xirivella, Paterna, San Antonio, Lliria and Perellonet make up our outside Valencia list. What annoys and confuses us massively is that there is still nothing in Naquera or Serra which is now the third year of writing that sentence and wondering why. However my suspicion is the lack of public transport options. They seem further out as they are only connected by the odd bus. However, good news, there are now more regular and reliable buses to both Naquera and Serra so will we start to see movement there? Will that be enough?

Nationalities

The United States make up 52.7% of our sales so far this year, up from 48.3% last year. More than half of everything we sell now goes to an American buyer. That is a slight rise of course but a modest one on top of a number that was already high. The more useful way to look at it is that the American share has now been around or above half for two years running. Compare that with when it was 7.5% in 2018. That's a huge movement in numbers.

The United Kingdom is at 12.2%, up from 8.6%, which puts it clearly in second place.

And now the part we are not pleased about. Dutch buyers were 19% of our sales last year. This year they are under 3%. That is not a change in Dutch appetite for Valencia and nobody should read it as one as the numbers of sales in the whole market are roughly similar for Dutch buyers this year compared with the last. We need to do better.

We are telling you rather than leaving the Netherlands off the list or not mentioning it because the whole point of running these reports off our own completions instead of somebody's press release is that you get the bad years and the bad news along with the good bits. It is being dealt with internally. However, anecdotally the Dutch buyers who have come through our doors this year so far have largely been indecisive on making offers or have offered too little thinking they can get 10-25% off asking prices. They can't and as we have mentioned many times before on these pages, you do that with a Spanish seller and they will not come down in price at all. The Americans listen and understand that in general, the Dutch not so much this year so far. However read on and you may find out why the Dutch might not be wrong eventually.

Underneath the top two of the USA and the UK the spread of nationalities is the widest we have ever had. 16 countries are represented so far against 10 across the whole of last year. Hungary, South Africa, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Romania, Ireland, Lebanon, Italy, Spain, France, Australia and Belgium have all appeared. Germany and Mexico are missing this year, so last year's invitation from us to them still stands along with the Ukrainians, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns etc...

For context, Asicval reports that 90.5% of agencies across the Valencian Community say their buyers come from within the region itself. Our client funnel looks nothing like that which is worth remembering whenever you read a regional statistic and try to apply it to yourself. When you come to Valencia you are not surrounded by 50% Americans and 12% Brits of course. That's just our client base. Those Americans, Brits, Dutch etc... make up under 20% of the whole market.

Types of Property

78% of our sales this year have been apartments and 22% villas, which is close to last year's split.

Townhouses are on zero. Not a low percentage, simply nothing, nada and nope! Last year I wrote that townhouses continue to be criminally overlooked as places to live, having lived in one myself for more than twenty-five years, and this year our market has managed to overlook them entirely. If you want more square metres, a bit of outside space, a manageable price and you do not fancy maintaining a pool and a garden, go and look at a townhouse. Somebody has to and just like the Dutch, one day I may be right.

Financing

35% of our sales this year have involved mortgage finance.

That is actually quite a high number for a client base that mostly does not need to borrow, and the reason has not changed since last year. Eurozone mortgage rates remain well below what North American buyers are getting at home and below what their own savings and investments are paying them. If your money is earning more in the States than a Spanish mortgage costs you here, borrowing is the arithmetically sensible move even when you could pay cash and have a property with no debt. Roughly a third of our buyers have now worked that out. Now of course many buyers cannot get a mortgage here for reasons such as age, lack of a salary or affordability criteria when the banks look at individual cases so the actual number wanting a mortgage may be higher than our 35% base figure (It is).

Nevertheless you need to realise one other thing worth knowing about mortgages this year and that is that they are slower. This is the banks and valuers point from a fortnight ago on the blog. Valuations are coming back late and sometimes low, and completion dates that used to be comfortable are now tighter due to this lentitude. If you are buying with finance this year we are building in more time than you think you may need or actually want and make sure not to book the removal van until the money is confirmed and the final completion date is set.

Client Funnel

Enquiries dropped noticeably in June and this continued into the first part of July. It was sharp enough that we really sat up and paid attention, you tend to do that when alarms go off. It matched what the rest of the sector was reporting too with 44% of Asicval agencies saying fewer people were coming through the door in the first quarter against only 22.5% seeing an increase. This slowdown in the local market increased dramatically in the second quarter in terms of completions as we shall see later.

For us this tendency has since corrected. The last couple of weeks have been busy and the funnel looks very healthy going into the autumn. Whether June was a real wobble or just people watching too much football and booking holidays we will know by October. The summer lull is a real thing every year which is one of the reasons we mostly close for August but let's just say it started early this year.

The Valencia Property Market

Here is the thing everyone is getting wrong about this year at the moment. A slower market does not mean cheaper houses... yet.

Idealista had second hand property in the city of Valencia at €3,370 per square metre in June, which was 0.2% below the all time high set in May and 9.9% up on June last year. So prices are still climbing, they are just climbing at a slower pace than they were and in the last month of the quarter there was essentially no change (0.2% is a rounding error but it shows the trend). Also Idealista has just changed the way they measure prices incorporating notary data along with asking prices so expect a bit of a difference moving forward.

Two details in those figures though are worth more than just the mere headline. The first is that the national average is now rising faster than Valencia, at 15.8% year on year against our 9.9%. For several years Valencia was the outlier that everyone wrote articles about but it isn't any more because Valencia is now a much more mature market*. However, if you have been holding off because you assumed the market in Valencia was overheated, you were wrong and now the rest of Spain is catching up with Valencia.

*The figures put out by the Notaries puts the Comunitat Valenciana price growth at 11.9% annually against 8.8% nationally so there is still a discrepancy between the Idealista figures and the Notary figures

The second is where the growth actually is. The double digit rises this year are in the outer neighbourhoods rather than the centre with Olivereta up 21.1% and Patraix up 18.7% while optimistically priced properties in the centre are starting to come down a little. The ring around the centre is doing the climbing right now as those priced out of central districts move slightly further away to more affordable areas. This is a pattern we have been describing to clients for two years and exactly what our own move outward in the numbers above reflects.

At the regional level Asicval had their average transaction at €270,000 in the first quarter with prices up 5.4% and expects that to halve to around 2.5% by the end of the second quarter. Moderating but still going up.

The Lack of Supply

Here's the continuing problem which supports the prices even as the number of transactions fall. The squeeze on numbers of properties on offer might be easing but it isn't going to disappear completely as building and licences take time, a lot of time. We are seeing roughly 25% more properties available than we were at this point in 2025 which is the first real loosening in years and the reason the market feels a little different, as a buyer you have a little more choice.

Do not mistake that for a buyer's market though. What has appeared is not more good property, it is more property. The best located and sensibly priced places still go very quickly, often within hours or days, and if anything the competition for those has increased because buyers are now sifting through more overpriced and badly located stock to find the gems.

What is sitting unsold and raising the available stock is the optimistically priced stuff, which is a polite way of saying overpriced. Owners who put a number on their house twelve months ago based on what their neighbour told them they got and then adding 20% are now watching it sit on the market and twiddling their thumbs accordingly. Some of them are dropping their prices, which I suppose is progress, but a good number are dropping from significantly "over the market" to merely "quite a bit over the market" and wondering why the phone is not ringing still. A 10% reduction on a 25% overpriced property is not a bargain, it's just a slightly smaller mistake in pricing.

The reason none of this turns into a glut is that nothing much is being built and licences are being granted at a pace best described as glacial, so no change there then. More listings from existing stock at optimistic prices when this isn't allied to more new builds appearing is not the same as more housing.

Getting Priced Out of the Market

Two years ago I wrote a section here called "For Some the Train Has Left the Station", about clients who could have bought in 2023 at the price and specification they wanted and by 2024 simply could not. That has not stopped happening with two more years of price rises.

What has changed slightly are the odds. With 25% more stock on the market and overpriced property owners softening their pretensions, patience is worth more this year than it was last year. Patience may work now. Not infinite patience, and not the sort of patience that consists of only waiting for prices to fall quickly because they are not falling yet. They may, see below, but currently no dice. However, the buyer who is determined, who is prepared to adjust one of the three variables of location, criteria or price, and who has somebody on the ground who knows which of the new listings are worth a viewing and which are fantasy (Ahem... us here at VP), has a better chance now than at any point since 2022. Let's just say prices are not running away as fast. The train has left the station but it's not steaming away to mangle the metaphor more.

That part about using local expertise is the bit we would say, obviously, being the people who do it, those here on the ground with our nose to the wheel each day. It also happens to be true, and it is even more true in a market with more listings than it was in a market with none.

The Thing That May Change Everything (Or not)

All of the above is true, stats and vibes don't lie much when combined but what may change the narrative is the latest notary's report. Released on Thursday last week it stated that completions in May in Valencia region reduced by... 35.8%. That's compared with May last year. That's huge. Nationally it was around an 11% drop which is more reasonable off last year's peak numbers. Last year saw record sales around May time all over the country but a drop of this size, 35.8%, is still significant. The reasons given were banks tightening lending criteria and prices being out of reach of those looking for finance because, remember, 75-80% of transactions are local in nature and most of those require mortgages.

However, there is one big factor they forgot to mention. May was the month when the tax rate was still 10% and we had a record month in June when the tax rate dropped to 9%, the notary offices were also pretty full in June with other agencies making completions. I suspect a lot of the 35% drop was final signings moving to June to take advantage of the new tax rates. When the June figures come out we will see but interestingly the 35.8% figure wasn't repeated anywhere in Spain and the tax change was only in Valencia.

Equally when looking at mortgages we need to look at what else the notaries reported. Mortgage lending for house purchases across Spain fell 4% in May. In the Comunitat Valenciana it fell 26.1%. Spanish banks do not set their lending criteria region by region so a fall six and a half times the national rate in one autonomous community is not a credit squeeze. It is more like a diary really.

So May's transactions did not disappear. They moved three or four weeks and people sat around waiting. They probably happened in June. We will know for certain when the June notary figures come out and if June does not show a corresponding spike then we are wrong and you should come back and tell us so. But for now, treat the 35.8% as an accounting blip rather than the market falling off a cliff.

None of which means nothing is happening. Transactions have been slower recently, the market has cooled from where it was and the underlying question of affordability for local buyers on local salaries has not gone anywhere. Just do not read a tax deadline as a crash.

Expectations for the Rest of 2026

We expect a quieter third quarter, because we always have a quieter third quarter. August is essentially written off and September starts slowly as a result. July was comparatively quiet but anything would seem quiet compared to a record month for completions in June after the tax on purchases reduced.

On our side there is a fair amount changing. We are reworking the website, putting much more weight on the enquiry form and the consultation call as the way to start working with us, and expanding what we do with affiliates and partners to bring more people to us in the third and fourth quarters. If you have been meaning to get in touch, the form below is the fastest route and always has been since we started doing it a few years ago.

On the market, we expect price rises to keep moderating without stopping. Nothing in the supply picture suggests a flood of property arriving to change that because building is slow and licensing is even slower. More listings from existing owners, yes. Actual new housing, no. So the direction of travel isn't turning around it's just moving at a gentler angle than the one we have all got used to or maybe we can see it plateauing at current prices with the overpriced sellers starting to get desperate and dropping which may actually give a false impression of falling prices in the market as a whole.

But... if the drop in sales from May continues without the corresponding blip in June then we may all be wrong. Maybe the headline should be it's no longer a seller's market. It's definitely not a buyer's market yet and won't be as long as interest rates stay low and banks continue to lend to qualified buyers. It is however turning that way.

And maybe soon the Dutch will be right and you can make lower offers without compromising your possibility of actually buying a place. We aren't there yet and honestly, that point might still be a long way off for 90% plus of properties. Making an offer of 20% off to someone with an overpriced property might mean you get it at market value if the owners eventually understand that the train isn't going to get to their station. More likely it will mean those properties stay on the property portals gathering dust and muddying the waters of the market.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your thoughts on this mid-year report and what may or may not happen in the future. The wisdom of the masses is worth something. Send us a mail to information@www.valencia-property.com and tell us where you are on your Valencia Property journey. We'd love to hear from you.

Holidays

I'm writing this from Northern Spain on holiday. We are mostly closed for August as we always are. There will be a couple of us around and reachable and if you cannot avoid coming to Valencia in the heat we will find a way to help, but do not expect the whole fully oiled Valencia Property machine. Even a machine needs siestas in the heat.

I will be in Asturias for most of the summer working on the websites, planning the next few months and sending everyone photographs of fabada, rice puddings, low hanging clouds over mountains and greenery until people get sick of it and block me. The blog carries on through the summer and so does the podcast. There is more on all of that in Summertime and the Living is Easy.

The best thing you can do before September is fill in the form and tell us what you are looking for and when you are coming. The more you tell us the better we can help. See below and fill it in.

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