To sell your Costa del Sol property ... raise its price!
Monday, May 22, 2017 @ 11:13 PM
In a previous article I have mentioned that many properties on the Costa del Sol have had their prices raised after a certain period in the market. I wondered what the price path was for properties which actually got sold - it's one thing to raise the asking price of a property but another to sell it at that.
My data sample involves 590 properties that had at least 1 price change through their life on the market, and which then went on to get sold in 2016/17 for that last price point. Not a massive data sample but it spans a wide range of locations, it comes from various agents, and it covers all property types. I was not expecting this:
1. How many decreased vs. how many increased
| Properties sold at a price lower than the initial |
436 |
| Properties sold at a price equal to the initial (changed, then changed back) |
24 |
| Properties sold at a price higher than the initial |
129 |
A whole 33% of the properties sold at a higher price than their initial one! Half of those properties were on the market for less than 300 days - not an unreasonable amount of time to wait for a sale. The midpoint house/apartment/villa was on the market for 251 days.
2. The maximum amount of a price upward change
The top 3 upward price changes were for villas in Nueva Andalucia where the maximum upward price revision was ... 510,000 euros, a 30% increase for that particular property. Of course Nueva Andalucia has some very desirable properties but it is striking that 9.6% of the upwardly-revised properties (not only villas) were located there. Next best locations were Guadalmina and Fuengirola.
3. Similar time on the market
Of course there were also some extremes, for example an apartment in Calahonda had taken 1660 days to sell. However approximately 250 days is what it took for both sets of properties to sell. Which probably means that sellers are not necessarily too desperate to sell, otherwise we would have seen really short periods on the market for properties that were reduced in price, indicating pressure to sell.
My conclusions: despite my average-sized data sample (unfortunately I can only work with the sales price data I have access to), it seems that the desire to get more money for a property is strong. Sellers are willing to change their price upwards and still they manage to only wait a similar amount of time for a sale as the more keen sellers.Long may this optimism last! :-)