Taking into account the special market we have in the Costa del Sol with multiple transactions with foreign buyers, I think it is interesting to study what was the effect of the covid pandemic we suffered in 2020 on the sales to foreigners in the province of Malaga (the data is not published in detail for each of the municipalities so the analysis has to be restricted to the whole province of Malaga) during the whole past year. If we observe chart 1, we can see that the number of units sold to foreigners went down in line with the general reduction in sales during the year caused by the pandemic. Even more, the percentage of sales to foreigners went down a little bit further in line with the tendency observed from 2017. It is easily understandable that the restrictions to the traveling will cause it and, in fact, I personally thought that the fall was going to be greater, was really a low 2,5%, if we take into account just the difficulties to simply enter in Spain. Furthermore, the reduction in that percentage of sales to foreigners for the whole Spain was a much greater 9% so Malaga has been one of the provinces where the effect has been softer.
On the other hand and if nationalities are considered (in this case we have to refer to purchases by foreigners in the whole Andalucia as specific data for Malaga is not published), we will highlight two main conclusions obtained from chart 2. First, that the fall in the number of sales to British continued during 2020 although it is still the nationality with more purchases in Andalucia. We hoped that that tendency changes after the Brexit agreement at the end of 2020 and the recovery of the exchange rate of the pound versus de euro. Secondly, there are three nationalities that increased its percentage during 2020, Swedish, Belgians and Dutch. This rise in the percentage can be explained by the fact that these three nationalities plus the Norwegians are the ones that have a higher percentage of purchases of new units. As we have commented previously, sales of new units are registered some time after the sale is closed, when the units are delivered, so some of the sales of new units in 2020 correspond to sales closed in 2019 or even 2018 and were, of course, not affected by the covid pandemic.
Source: Registradores de España