Every spring I am asked for the same thing, and it is always a number. Is the coast up or down. What does a square metre cost now in Nueva Andalucía. I am not going to answer that here: I have no measurement of my own that I would still stand behind in a year, and a figure copied out of someone else’s press release is worth nothing to a person about to sign.
What I do have is the view from a car that drives this coast most days of the week. The sub-market that is moving is not a district; it is a use. Fewer of the people I take out are buying two weeks in August, and more are buying somewhere they mean to be for a serious part of the year. A house that is perfect for a fortnight of summer is not automatically a house that works in February.
From a holiday house to a house you live in
The people have barely changed: northern Europeans buying with their own money and their own plan. What has loosened is the scaffolding around a long stay. Work that can be done from anywhere no longer has to be won from an employer, and part of a school year abroad has become a normal conversation.
You hear it in a viewing. The questions that used to come last now come first. How is the house actually heated. Is there a supermarket open in January. Where would a desk go, and is that room quiet when the gardeners arrive. Whether there is a bath is asked less often than whether a door closes between a work call and the rest of the house.
What year-round use does to the brief
When the brief moves from holiday to home, unglamorous items climb to the top of the list — the ones furniture cannot fix.
- A room that can be worked in: a door that shuts, and a wall without the neighbour’s pool pump behind it.
- Connectivity tested in that room, on that day, on the line the house already has — not promised in a brochure.
- A kitchen for cooking most nights rather than for opening two bottles in August: storage, extraction that works, somewhere for the shopping to land.
- Winter light. Orientation decides more of the comfort of a Spanish house than heating does, and the shaded side of a sierra loses the sun earlier than the same house lower down the slope.
- Heating that is an installation rather than a decorative fireplace, and a village around it that still has its lights on in February.
None of that is judged on an afternoon in June. If you can see the house only once, take the hour at which you would genuinely be in the room you care about most. I would rather a buyer walked away after a grey January morning than signed for a house that photographs better than it lives.
The other question that comes with year-round use is what happens to the house in the months you are not in it. That is a legal choice before a commercial one: in Andalusia a long winter let and a week in August fall under different regimes, and another article here sets out the difference. Settle it with your own abogado or gestor before the purchase rather than after.
Buyers arrive better prepared, and that changes what an agent is for
The other real shift is on the far side of the table. People land here having read the portals for months, measured plots on satellite images and walked streets on street view. Some arrive with a spreadsheet stricter than my own. That is a good development, and I would not want the old way back.
It does mean the old job is gone. Showing someone a listing they have already seen is not a service. What is left is the real work: knowing which of two similar houses carries a licence problem that will surface at the notary, which community has a repair coming that nobody advertises, and saying so about a house I would earn a fee on.
A buyer who has already seen the photographs does not need a tour. They need someone prepared to say the photographs are flattering a terrace that loses the sun early.
What has not changed
Three things stand where they stood. The first is that a good purchase takes longer than the trip booked for it. Three well-run days will narrow a list of ten to a shortlist; what they cannot do is stand in for the second visit. The houses people are still happy with years later were almost always seen twice, once in another season.
The second is your own abogado — independent of the seller, of the developer and of me. I can tell you what to look at; I cannot be the person who checks it for you, and an agent offering to be both should worry you more than the paperwork does. That check decides whether what you are buying is what is registered.
The third is that the best houses here still rarely reach a portal, for reasons that have nothing to do with secrecy and everything to do with how a discreet seller behaves. There is a separate piece in this journal on how those sales actually work.
What I will not predict
I do not know where this market goes next, and neither does anyone who tells you with a percentage attached. Currencies move, rules change, and a run of wet winters does more to a village than any forecast in a brochure. A house chosen for the way you genuinely intend to use it survives a market nobody predicted; a house bought as a bet does not.
So the advice for this season is narrow and slightly boring. Come outside August. Walk the neighbourhood you think you want on a weekday morning in the low season and see who else is out. Ask the unglamorous questions before you ask about the view. The buyer’s guides here set out the sequence and the documents; if you would rather talk it through, write to me and tell me which part of the year you mean to be here. That answer shapes a shortlist more than any figure I could have quoted above.
