The price of housing in Spain, which has been rising for a decade, has not yet found its ceiling, despite the rise in mortgage prices. The price of houses grew by 7.8% in the second quarter of the year compared to the same period of the previous year, according to data published by the INE this Thursday. It is the largest increase since 2002 and is driven, above all, by new housing, which soared by 11.2% year-on-year, its fastest pace since the summer of 2007, when the real estate bubble burst. The shortage of supply of new developments puts pressure on the prices of this submarket and transfers the tension to second-hand housing, which raised its prices by 7.3%, the largest increase since the summer of 2022. No autonomous community was spared from recording increases, being especially intense in Navarra (10.3%), Aragón (9.9%) and Andalucía (9.5%). That the price of housing is advancing without restraint is something that is reflected in all real estate statistics. What is not so clear is whether real estate activity continues to slow down, as indicated by the INE, as a result of the progressive increases in interest rates carried out by the European Central Bank (ECB), or has begun to reactivate, as noted by the General Council of Notaries, due to the recent relaxation of the central bank's monetary policy and a possible new rate cut in September. According to the data published by the INE, which are obtained from the information contained in the Property Registries of the entire national territory, the purchase and sale of homes fell by 4.49% in the first half of the year: from 313,272 operations in the first six months of 2023 to 299,223 in the same period of 2024. On the other hand, the statistics handled by notaries show that, from January to June, the purchase and sale of homes grew by 5.86%, going from 330,874 operations in the first half of 2023 to 350,254 in the same time frame in 2024. The last comparable month – with data from both entities – is June and reflects these discrepancies very well. According to the INE, sales fell by 6.12% year-on-year; notaries say they rose by 3.9%. Precisely this Wednesday, the General Council of Notaries published the statistics for July, a month in which transactions grew by no less than 20.2% and mortgages rose by 31.1%. We have to wait until September 26 to find out the INE figure. What is the reason for this difference? The statistics come from different sources of information and document different acts in the process of buying a house, that is, they refer to different times. Consequently, the data they express are not the same, so it is not strange that they do not coincide. Some are obtained from the moment of signing the sale before a notary. Others, when these documents are registered in the Property Registries. An aside to explain that if there is a mortgage involved, registration in the Registry is mandatory. “The sale must necessarily be registered before the mortgage,” says José Miguel Tabares, vice-dean and director of the Statistics Service of the College of Registrars. If there is no financing, it is voluntary. “The registration of sales, although not mandatory due to the important legal effects of protection that it entails for the buyer, in practice in urban areas (more than 90% of sales) nearly 100% are registered,” adds Tabares. Thus, the lag between one act and another is indeterminate and this explains why the imbalance between the statistics can easily be several months. “In the case of buyers with mortgage financing, whose procedures are carried out by the bank's agency, the average time between the signature at the notary's office and the signature at the Registry can be two to three months, if everything goes well,” says María Teresa Barea, spokesperson for the General Council of Notaries. If there are incidents, that is, if there are deficiencies in the documentation that must be corrected, the deadlines can be extended to three or four months. This is because “the document is subject to legality control by the property registrar, for which there is a maximum period of 15 days, and in the event that there are inaccuracies in the document, this period would count from when they have been corrected. In addition, the corresponding taxes must be paid beforehand, with the maximum period being 30 days,” says Tabares. If, on the other hand, the sale operation is carried out without the mediation of an agency, it is impossible to talk about deadlines. “There are people who register the sale after six months and others who do it after five years or only when they decide to sell,” says Barea. The professor of Applied Economics at Pompeu Fabra University, José María Montalvo, points out other factors: “It may also happen that in some places there may be several notaries and only one registrar, which means that in periods of high activity they cannot cope. Another factor is the possibility that self-promotions, even if they are already completed, do not request registration in the Registry to continue paying the contribution as land instead of buildings.
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Notarial statistics are fed by notarial indices that are grouped fortnightly (notaries send the documentation every 15 days to the regional notarial association and from there they go to CIEN, the Statistical Information Centre for Notaries). “The CIEN data correspond to the same month in which the sale and deed were carried out before a notary,” explains Barea. In this sense, says the notary, “it is a statistic that gives you an image almost in real time. The notary’s work is close to the street, so it anticipates trends.” María Teresa Barea sees this trend clearly: “The data reflect that the decline in sales has slowed, that the fall or stagnation seems to have been reversed and that the trend is ascending.” In addition to the INE, the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility also feeds on the information contained in the Property Registries. And the Association of Registrars itself prepares its real estate registry statistics, this on a quarterly basis. The latest published data, corresponding to the second quarter, indicates that the number of home sales fell by 3.4%. “In terms of the object, the notarial statistics refer to documents executed before a Spanish notary and the registry statistics also include administrative, judicial and foreign notary documents. And, in quantitative spatial terms, the property registries are governed by demarcations that limit the geographical scope of the registered operation,” explains the vice-dean of the College of Registrars. The curious thing is that the statistics of INE and the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility do not coincide with this statistic, even taking the same data as a basis. “We cannot explain the discrepancy in sales between the INE and the Property Registries beyond the fact that the INE makes its own adjustments and validations in the microdata it receives and due to possible variations in the dates of the samples,” says Tabares. The property registry statistics include the participation of all Spanish property registries, that is, 1,059 offices. “The universe of data for the study is about 1,150,000 transfers for the sale of real estate (homes, commercial premises, industrial warehouses, etc.) and more than 500,000 mortgage constitutions,” summarises Tabares. We must not forget that the Registry also receives public notarial, judicial, administrative and foreign notary documents, and is therefore an institution that records all transactions. The registrars say that their statistics for the third quarter must be awaited to confirm whether or not the change in trend in sales referred to by the notaries is taking place. According to José Miguel Tabares, “the situation in the coming months will be directly related to the evolution of interest rates; reductions are already being announced, which may encourage purchases and sales in the near future and the evolution of prices, since a continued rise could hinder the volume of operations.”