We have just learned that 15% of rental applicants are already foreigners. According to the media 20 minutos, “The study of housing in Spain also includes foreigners who come looking for a new residence in our country, a supply and demand market that has certain particularities”.
A new report from the real estate portal Idealista explains that foreigners are looking less and less for an apartment to buy and are opting more for renting.
Analyzing the latest published statistics, 14.9% of the demand for rental housing in Spain in 2022 is from foreigners.
The foreigners looking for rentals in Spain come mainly from Europe. A few years ago there was a lot of demand from the United Kingdom and, nowadays, there is an increasing demand from France, Germany, Poland, Norway or Canada.
The most sought-after destination is focused on coastal and tourist areas. Alicante is the most sought-after location and is the only province where more than 30% of the demand for rental housing comes from foreigners; along with Tenerife (29.6%), the Balearic Islands (27.8%), Las Palmas (24%), and Malaga (26.9%), among others.
The provinces with the least foreign demand for rentals are Melilla, Madrid, Jaén, Salamanca and Guipúzcoa, among others.
According to Idealista, “14.9% of total rental housing demand came from abroad at the close of 2022, the highest percentage in the historical series that started at the beginning of 2019″. To contextualize this figure, it is enough to remember that the average of the last four years stands at 11.2%, 3.7 points below the latest available data; and that, in December last year, the demand to rent a house in Spain from citizens coming from other countries exceeded by four tenths of a percent the searches related to the sale and purchase (14.5%). In other words: foreign citizens already have more weight in the demand for renting than for buying. Germany and France are the countries with the highest number of searches for rental properties. In the Mediterranean and the islands is where foreign demand has more weight. Foreigners are not only interested in buying homes in Spain: they are increasingly looking for houses to rent”, states the newspaper 20 minutos.
As a curiosity, in Teruel the country of reference in foreign demand for rentals is Poland, while in Avila it is Colombia and in Soria, Argentina. Searches from Italy, meanwhile, are the most prominent in Cordoba, Seville, Burgos and Valladolid, while Morocco is the main reference in the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. In the case of Alicante, the province with the highest demand, the country from which most searches come from is the Netherlands, as recently published by Idealista.