The information to produce this article has been gathered from the Land Registry and is the most detailed set of data available for this kind analysis. However, I know that some of the transactions closed on luxury properties are done inside companies and those are not reflected at the Land Registry because there is not a transfer of ownership on the property itself but on the shares of the company that owns the asset. In any case, although the information gathered is not fully complete, it has enough validity for this analysis.
Going back to the results and, first, talking about Marbella, there is an interesting conclusion coming out from chart 1 that is that the percentage of transactions closed on luxury properties, defined as properties closed on top of one million euros (1 M€ on the charts), versus the total number of sales closed in Marbella went up 1% in 2020 even with the covid restrictions. That upward tendency in the luxury market comes from 2017 but showed an acceleration in 2020 specially in the high end properties on top of 1.5 M€. It can be seen that in previous years there were more sales in the range form 1 M€ to 1.5 M€ than in the 1.5 M€ to 4 M€ but in 2020 the number of closed units in both ranges were quite similar showing that the latest was less affected by covid.
When talking about Benahavis, the same tendency can be seen: an increased percentage of sales in the high end range that started already in 2019. But, compared to Marbella, the ranges on the high end increased in 2020 with more sales on top of 1.5 M€ while the percentage of sales in the range between 1 M€ and 1.5 M€ went down. Since 2019, we can see that in Benahavis most of the sales were in the middle range of luxury properties, that is between 1.5 M€ and 4 M€. It is also to be said that it helps that most of the inventory is on that range.
Finally, we did a check on the distribution of sales per council to observe that most of the luxury transactions are closed in Marbella and, taking into account the size and population of it, Benahavis. The percentages are much lower for Mijas and Estepona.