Luxury apartments Barcelona, Costa Brava Villas and Ibiza Real Estate

Next week, Lucas Fox International Properties will release three half-yearly real estate market reports analysing the January to June 2011 period. This includes analysis of:

• Luxury apartments Barcelona
• Costa Brava villas
• Ibiza real estate.

Readers can download copies of the reports from the Lucas Fox website  and from this blog’s Spanish Real Estate Market Reports page. If you are interested in keeping an eye on when is the best time to buy property in Spain, we encourage you to subscribe to the Lucas Fox blog so we can keep you up to date with future releases of the market reports.

The data that is used in the report comes from a variety of sources:

• online real estate portals
• Spanish housing and statistics Governmental departments
• Lucas Fox sales data (for example, sales of Costa Brava villas in the first half of 2011), and
• feedback from Lucas Fox luxury property buyers.

A key complaint about Spanish property data over the past few years has been its inconsistency. This is often the case with economic figures, and Spain has received its fair share of complaints. This has included complaints pointing to differences in how property data is presented, and disagreements about the core set of economic metrics that should be used to forecast future growth and prosperity for the country more broadly.

For example, in July this year, leading economic agencies ranging from the Bank of Spain, the Spanish Government, the IMF and OECD each drew on different sets of metrics to calculated forecasted growth in household consumption. This resulted in differences from 0.9% growth predicted for 2011 (by a consensus of independent analysts) to 1.6% growth (predicted by the OECD).

Differences in forecasting and analysing property markets is similar.

To address the disparity in ways of reporting housing data, Lucas Fox triangulates the data sources used when collating our half-yearly market reports. As leaders in the Spanish luxury property market, we are also able to compare the figures to the experiences of our sales staff and the feedback we receive from our customers, property buyers, and recent property sellers. This helps us ensure the data reflects the real experiences in the market, in each of the three key locations.

“Triangulation of data” is a process where several sources are used to measure the same topic. For example, when looking at house sale prices, we looked at monthly data reports from:

• leading online web portals fotocasa and idealista,
• an industry housing price index designed by real estate portal Kyero in partnership with real estate analysts Tinsa
• Spanish Government Department of Housing and Development
• Spanish National Statistics Institute.

Make sure you subscribe to the Lucas Fox blog to be sent a copy of the market reports as soon as they are released.

The reports cover:

• The real estate markets in Barcelona, Costa Brava and Ibiza
• The luxury property markets in each location: the market for luxury apartments Barcelona, sales of Costa Brava villas, and the strength of Ibiza real estate
• Property sales data summary
• Long term rental in Barcelona
• The short term property rental market in each location
• Foreign investment
• Predictions for the remainder of 2011.

In the meantime, here is one of our sources for data for our research. It was only able to help us look at some facts about the first quarter of 2011, but it is an interesting insight into the Spanish Government’s official figures. It was used by the Spanish Housing and Development Ministers during their roadshow tour to encourage foreign investment in Spanish property:

Presentations released by the National Department of Housing and Development to encourage foreign property investment.

Subscribe to the Lucas Fox blog to be sent a copy of the luxury apartments Barcelona, Costa Brava villas, and Ibiza real estate market reports for 2011.