A DEEP disquiet is beginning to set in along Spain’s coastal regions after the release of the latest numbers from the Spanish General Council of Notaries.

The shocking headline figure is that foreign buyers now outright outnumber Spanish ones in parts of the Mediterranean housing market.

Around 53% of all home purchases in Alicante province are now made by foreign citizens in the first nine months of 2024, making locals a minority in their own housing market.

READ MORE: Costa del Sol property prices soar 17% as two-bed flat reaches an eyewatering €318,000

Javea is one of the towns in Spain where foreign buyers outweigh locals

The trend is most visible in the Costa Blanca towns of Javea, Altea, Torrevieja and Benidorm, where estate agents don’t even bother drawing up listings in Spanish.

Properties are increasingly being marketed and sold in English, Dutch and German before local buyers can even make enquiries.

Estate agents say prices are being set to match Northern European incomes.

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In these markets, asking prices are commonly pegged not to Spanish wages, but to incomes earned in London, Amsterdam or Düsseldorf.

As the Madrid daily El Diario put it in a recent report: “Prices here no longer reflect what a local worker earns.”

Over in Malaga province, events are following the same trajectory.

Around 43% of home purchases there are already made by foreign buyers, with the strongest concentration in the so-called Golden Triangle of Marbella, Benahavis and Estepona.

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The Costa del Sol is also seeing the number of foreign buyers start approach parity with Spanish ones

New-build luxury developments now routinely exceed €5,200 per square metre, and in some beachfront schemes the price per metre pushes beyond €5,500, according to data from Property Partners.

In these markets, high-end homes are purchased by British, American, French, Nordic, Middle Eastern and Eastern European buyers, many relocating for lifestyle, remote work or tax residency.

Homes in these markets sell fast. In some ultra-prime pockets, one in every five listings now sells in under 10 days — a pace that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

But the highest concentration of foreign purchases is along the Mediterranean and island provinces, foreign demand is not limited to just Alicante and the Costa del Sol. 

READ MORE: Property boom continues with prices rising by 15% in just a year on Spain’s Costa Blanca

Tenerife actually comes ahead of Malaga in percentage of foreign buyers

After Alicante comes Tenerife, with 45.2% of buyers being foreign.

Then come the Balearic Islands (42.3%), and Malaga (43.7%), while Murcia and Girona also show elevated levels at around 31%. 

This pattern captures a coastal housing market increasingly shaped by external rather than local purchasing power.

Across Spain, 95,114 homes were purchased by foreign buyers between January and September 2024, according to the Ministry of Housing – 18.05% of the total. 

READ MORE: Spain’s property boom continues to break records with over 64,000 properties sold in July

Of these, 49,527 were bought by foreign residents already living in Spain, while 44,675 were bought by non-residents acquiring second homes or investment properties. 

Local residents are increasingly boxed out.

The drumbeat of disquiet has been growing steadily within Spain for several years.

A recent editorial in La Opinion de Malaga warned: “Young people here cannot compete with these buyers.”

Housing researchers note that the issue is not simply foreigners purchasing homes, but the scale of buying for second homes, investment or short-term holiday lets, which removes properties from the long-term local market.

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National figures indicate that around 40% of purchases by foreigners are to people who don’t even live in Spain, buying for second homes or investment properties.

It is this latter category that most sharply reduces the supply of homes available to locals.

As El País observed in a recent report on Malaga’s coastal housing market: “The economy appears to be booming thanks to these influxes, but the local population is actually living worse than before.”

The trade union CCOO has warned of ‘a gradual displacement of local residents’ in coastal zones affected by foreign-led housing price inflation.

That has led to steep rises in rents and fewer available homes for workers in tourism, services and public sector jobs, forcing children to live with their parents – sometimes until the latter die.

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Property analysts stress that the issue is not foreigners buying homes per se – but the imbalance between local wages and imported purchasing power, coupled with the conversion of homes into holiday lets and speculative assets. 

Spanish provincial wages remain among the lowest in Western Europe, while the Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol now benchmark pricing to earnings earned abroad.

The national picture is less extreme but still trending upward.

Across Spain, around one in five home sales now involve foreign buyers, a share that has steadily increased since 2013.

But on the east and south coasts, the proportion is now closer to one in two, reshaping entire local markets.

READ MORE: Valencia has biggest city property rental demand from foreign tenants in Spain

Policy responses are still limited.

Spain continues to promote its property market internationally, while regions such as the Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol depend heavily on foreign demand to sustain construction, tourism and municipal finances.

Whether these areas remain lived-in communities or shift further toward seasonal enclaves will depend on whether the citizens can get the politicians’ attention.

With municipal elections not for another two years, local town halls might not be incentivised to give up the economic strategy that has, in large part, made Spain increasingly rich – at least on paper.

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