subject: Malaga Property Benefits From Unending Popularity [print this page] Property in Malaga continues to benefit from the city's dominance of global tourism. According to the latest data from SkyScanner, one of the world's largest online flight booking services, Malaga remained at no1 in the top 50 places in order of most bookings. Mark Burns takes a closer look at the Malaga property market, to see why this beautiful region retains an enduring charm for people seeking to buy property in Spain.
This is particularly good news for property in Malaga, because SkyScanner is the domain of people booking flights independent of package holiday deals and travel agents, which means that they will mostly be staying in privately rented accommodation. This therefore points to continued strength in Malaga's holiday rentals market and increasing rental yields for property owners.
Malaga is a city in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, and has long been one of the most popular tourism destinations in the world. In particular with visitors from the major northern European travel markets such as the UK, Scandinavia and Germany. Andalusia itself is famous in the property world, for being one of the most popular regions for foreign buyers, and, Malaga for being a hotspot within a hotspot.
For this reason, like many other parts of Spain, and places in the world that were extremely popular with foreign buyers, demand for property in Malaga and Andalusia never completely collapsed during the financial crisis. According to experts on the ground and those in the industry, enquiry levels dropped off by about 20%.
With enquiries for property in the region still coming in strongly, the market's biggest hindrance was reality, or rather the sellers' failure to be able to grasp the new reality. Buyers were hearing about the collapse of the Spanish property market, and they were coming in expecting to get some serious bargains. Meanwhile the vendors, who were still getting plenty of interest, were frantically trying to convert them into sales without having to lower their prices.
This changed between 3 and 6 months ago depending on what city or region you are looking at. Malaga's intense popularity (other popular regions saw enquiries fall 25%), unfortunately led to it being one of the last places to see properties being discounted by the 15-25% necessary in order to start converting again, this finally happened as we came into 2010.
Now, buyers are slowly but surely realising that Malaga property has at last caught up with reality, and if they come in now with a decent offer and a readiness to buy, they will be able to secure some fabulous properties at some even more fabulous prices.
The biggest problem for Malaga, Marbella and other markets that have seen a similar resurgence in demand once discounts became commonplace, is judging how to phase out of the discounts. The best policy will likely be to look at the discounts as the new price, and let the markets return to growth in their own time.
