«Although during the declaration of the last state of alarm and the impossibility of travelling between autonomous communities there was an alarming drop in activity since Pfizer made its announcement last November 9th, there has been a very notable dynamism, with an increase of up to 40% in the number of visits to properties», according to Gonzalo Robles, CEO of Uxban.
The performance of the luxury residential market is much better than expected since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. Mobility restrictions and global uncertainty foreshadowed a radical decrease in the number of transactions, and consequently, a price adjustment before this temporary situation of lack of liquidity, which led to the forecast of a 10-15% drop in sales prices.
However, the year-on-year drop in luxury home prices in Madrid has been -3.5%, and the change between the second and third quarters of the year has been only -1.6%, according to the latest Global Cities Index published by Knight Frank. «Taking into account that these periods reflect the worst phases of the health crisis, we can affirm that the recovery of the sector in 2021 will be solid,» said Robles.
Despite the fact that transactions are closing more slowly than before the health crisis, buyers are already returning to the market confidently that the pandemic has a predictable expiration date.
Along with frequent buyers. (historically and in percentage terms buyers from Colombia and Venezuela) a lot of interest is now being attracted to investors from Mexico and Peru. They are looking to diversify their wealth in Europe with a strong currency, in the same way as they did previously in the United States.
On the other hand, video calls became during confinement and nowadays as one of the best tools related to housing sales. Almost 18% of the transactions that Uxban has carried out have been made through video calls. «Although transactions are not usually closed in this way, it is a very powerful tool that allows buyers to make an initial filter of properties so that when they come to Spain, they only have to make a purchase decision based on two or three finalist properties», says Uxban’s CEO.
