Valencia Property Blog

If you are looking at official statistics to find out how many foreigners buy property in Valencia then you can find any number of different figures. The notary figures, differ from the registry figures and they differ from the numbers given by portals and agency reports. Also you need to bear in mind where they are talking about because Valencia City, Valencia Province and the Valencia Community are three totally different places. Today's blog therefore is a deep dive into the numbers of foreigners buying property in "Valencia" and living in the city to demonstrate a few things about the housing market.

The numbers are surprising.
Perception may be wrong.
Foreigners are not the problem.

So let's start with a fact. The Colegio de Registradores reports that foreigners bought 31.03% of homes in the Comunitat Valenciana in the second quarter of 2026. That sounds high, and it is, but there are certain factors that skew this number upwards. For a start, most of that figure belongs to Alicante. You also have to distinguish between resident and non-resident foreigners. The nationalities can also be surprising.

Before you start reading this article though let's have a little quiz. Think about your answers and then take a look below to see if you preconceived ideas were right.

What percentage of residents in Valencia were foreign born?
Which nationality has the highest numbers of purchases?
Are the majority of foreign buyers in Valencia residents or non-residents?
What percentage of buyers are from the USA?
Who pays the most in terms of price per m2?

First Things First

The first thing to notice is that the majority of sales in Valencia are made to Spanish nationals. However the 31.03% figure for foreign buyers in the community is influenced massively by something big, Alicante. The Valencia Comunitat is split in two very different areas. Alicante province stands at 46.43% foreign buyers whereas Valencia and Castellón are both at about 16%, which is almost exactly the Spanish average. That's a huge difference. Foreign buyers took 15.98% of home sales in Spain in the second quarter of 2026, very similar to both Valencia and Castellón.

Alicante province has about half of the total number of sales of property in the Valencian community so the percentage of foreign buyers for the province as a whole are skewed higher by the enormous numbers in Alicante. Valencia, despite having a larger population, has fewer transactions.

Valencia vs The Rest Of Spain

The Registradores website records the nationality of the buyer. The Ministry of Housing also records whether the buyer lives in Spain, and that tells us what kind of foreign buyer we are dealing with, resident or non-resident.

In 2025, foreigners bought 18.2% of homes in Valencia province, a little more than a point above the Spanish average of 16.9%. It's the mix of resident and non-resident that differs. Foreigners who live in Spain bought 14.9% of Valencia's homes against 10.1% across Spain. Foreigners who live abroad, ie non-residents, bought just 3.4% in Valencia against 6.8% across Spain. That makes 82% of foreign buyers in Valencia residents, against 60% nationally. But when we look at Alicante the difference is even more stark.

That's a big difference and tells us something important, Valencia is much less a second-home market than Alicante or other parts of Spain such as the Andalucia Coastal strip and the Costa Brava or the Balearics. Nevertheless, resident foreigners buy here at a similar rate to Alicante, both around 15%. The percentage of non-resident foreigners buying property here in Valencia is just 3.4% of the whole market. In Malaga and Alicante the numbers are much higher and people "buy to invest" which puts much more pressure on the local housing market.

Valencia City and Province

The foreign share of purchases in Valencia province is usually between 17% and 18% after a high of 20.5% in the first quarter of 2025. As mentioned, resident foreigners account for most of it in every quarter, at 14% to 16% of all sales, and non-residents have stayed at around 3%.

*You may notice a drop in sales in Q1 2026. We wrote about this on the blog. The tax went down from 10% to 9% in May 2026 so a lot of people waited before signing. You can see this with the numbers of sales going up in the Q2 figures despite the 9% not being in place for all of the quarter. The Notaries portal reported a rise of 7.9% in sales compared with the previous year in June 2026.

The city and the province are different markets on price. Valencia city is about a quarter of the province's sales and sells at roughly 50% more per square metre. In Alicante the capital is cheaper than the province around it.

Why might this be? Well, Valencia is considerably more expensive in the city per m2 than the province because Valencia City itself is the destination and the focus of buyers. In Alicante, properties in towns such as Moraira, Denia, Javea, Calpe and even Benidorm on the coastal strip are the destination and focus because most of the sales are to people looking for a second home. Alicante city itself is less so.

Who Lives in Valencia?

The population register shows who lives in the city. On 1 January 2025, València had 165,636 foreign residents, which is 19.61% of its population. About three-quarters of them come from outside the EU. As you will notice the only EU country featured in the top 6 in the city is Italy.

These are the people who live in the city itself. They are not necessarily the people who buy here though there are clues (See below).

The province and the Comunitat make the numbers different The INE counted 439,728 foreign residents in Valencia Province on 1 January 2025, about 16% of its population, and 1,055,925 in the Comunitat, which is 19.5%. Alicante province had 497,387 of those, or 24.5%.

By nationality, the Ministry of Inclusion's count of foreigners with valid residence documentation puts Romanians first in the Comunitat, ahead of the British, Ukrainians and Moroccans. This is a different count from the INE register above in the city and shows the numbers of Brits living on the Alicante coast for example and the huge numbers of refugees from Ukraine that Spain has welcomed since Putin's invasion.

Who Isn't Shown?

You may have noticed a few things in those nationalities. The Registradores publish North American buyers only as a group, and the Colegio Notarial's Valencia tables put them under "other nationalities" because traditionally there were so few comparatively. However, you don't see Americans, Brits or the Dutch in those numbers. No published report counts Americans for Valencia province or city, everything is an estimation.

In terms of sales and people potentially moving into Valencia we can see the following.

These are the sales made for Q1 2025 in Valencia City as I cannot find more recent data mapped out.

In Terms of Buying

What the national figures do show is that North Americans are a small group living here but when talking about buying property here they can just about be seen. North Americans made 2.87% of foreign purchases nationally in Spain in the second quarter, and USA citizens alone made 1.79%, which is roughly 385 purchases in the first quarter and 470 in the second. They paid an average of €4,311 per square metre, the highest price of any world zone and well above the €3,149 paid by buyers from the EU. This shows they buy in the more exclusive areas.

In the Comunitat Valenciana, North Americans made 0.52% of all home purchases over the twelve months to the second quarter of 2026 meaning that there were between 540 and 560 purchases with about 340 estimated to being from USA buyers. The quarterly numbers for the whole of Spain can be seen below.

Notary figures analysed by Idealista point the same way, although they are counted on a different basis from the Registradores and the totals should not be compared. It's complicated. According to this data, Americans made more than 1,500 purchases in Spain in the first half of 2025, up 14.3% on the year, at an average of €3,465 per square metre, the highest of any nationality.

Agencies make larger claims for Valencia (As we will do later but from our own figures). K&N Elite reports a 40% rise in US buyers arriving in the Comunitat in a year, mostly from Miami and Florida (This may say more about where they either have an office or a collaborating agency), and Engel & Völkers says North Americans bought more luxury homes in Valencia than any other foreign group (Probably among their clients). Those are agency statements, not official statistics and should be taken with a huge pinch of salt but they may have some basis in reality.

What It Means For Our Buyers

Most of the people you compete with in Valencia live and work in Spain. About 83% of buyers here are Spanish and another 14% are foreigners who already live in Valencia.
Non-residents were 3.1% of Valencia's sales in the second quarter of 2026, against 31.5% in Alicante province.
The Comunitat had the lowest mortgage coverage of any region in the first quarter at 58.7%, against 75.0% for Spain. Mortgage coverage means mortgages signed divided by sales made, so it is a rough guide to how many buyers pay cash. It means a much higher number of "cash" sales in the Comunitat.
València city costs about €2,868 per square metre against €1,911 for the province, so the choice of location influences the price more than anything else. Obviously more exclusive areas trend higher in price per m2.

Our Buyers Against The Market

American buyers have accounted for 51% of our sales so far this year. Last year they accounted for 49% so let's just say half. In the market as a whole Americans are under 2% of foreign buyers! Among our buyers they are about 25-30 times more prominent.

The market's typical foreign buyer in Valencia looks different to ours. As mentioned above, about 83% of buyers in Valencia province are Spanish, and the foreigners among them mostly live in Spain already. Non-residents were just 3.1% of sales in the second quarter. Many of those non-residents are our clients and they come from the segment the stats hardly look at. However in the vast majority of cases their intention is to become residents.

Americans, as mentioned above, pay above the average price per square metre. However this doesn't mean they are blowing residents out of the market or getting ripped off.

It's because of the type of property they are looking for. They largely buy the more exclusive properties in the most in demand areas

Naturally they pay a premium for that. The takeout should be that American buyers are not pushing other nationalities out of the market and they are most certainly not outcompeting with local first time buyers. There aren't enough of them to do that. They are though perhaps giving the higher value properties a more receptive market. Most of our clients buy to live here, not to invest nor to rent out. They become residents once they have bought and provide jobs and money into the local economy.

Anyway, these figures describe our clients, not the market. We are a buyer's agent that works in English and advertises to English speaking markets so we attract English-speaking buyers by design.

It's impossible to find the exact figures but here's an amazing quasi-stat. Extrapolating trends from our figures of sales in the city compared to sales in the rest of the province along with the numbers of Americans buying property in total as reported by notaries and the property registry then we can make a rough estimate. That estimate is that we make between 22-41% of all sales to American buyers in Valencia City itself (The range is because exact numbers of sales to Americans in the city itself are not known).

This is an amazing figure for a relatively small agency without the high end advertising and international presence of others.

And there's a reason for that. We are good at what we do and we provide peace of mind for American buyers the same as we do with buyers from many other countries.

If you want to join those who have trusted us to be their own personal property shopper in Valencia then simply fill in the form below and contact us.

Data Sources Cited

Registradores record the buyer's nationality when a sale is registered. The Ministry of Housing records residence from the deeds. The two give different levels (Valencia province was 16.32% in the Registradores and 17.3% in the Ministry for the second quarter of 2026), so each has its own different table. This difference maybe due to dual nationality buyers.

The Ministry's second-quarter 2026 figures are provisional.

Registradores do not publish North American buyers by province, and the Colegio Notarial groups them under other nationalities. Our American share comes from our own sales records. Registradores publish purchase counts only for the top eight nationalities, so the US purchase numbers are our estimates from the published shares and could be out by a few per cent.

The foreign-resident figures are for 1 January 2025 and count nationality, not place of birth. The city figure comes from the municipal register and the others from the INE, and the two differ slightly for the city. The nationality table counts foreigners with valid residence documentation, from Ministry of Inclusion data as reported by Vozpópuli, which is a different count from the INE register.
Colegio de Registradores, Q2 2026 and Q1 2026
Ministerio de Vivienda y Agenda Urbana, Boletín Estadístico
Ayuntamiento de València, Padrón 2025
Colegio Notarial de Valencia, foreign purchases Q1 2025

News From Spain

The right wing parties in the Congress voted down the measures that the government wanted to introduce to limit rental rises and the power of Vulture Funds. The suspicion is that the Government may now call an election at the end of November on what would effectively be a single issue, the access to housing at a national level.

This situation and the protests started after an 87 year old, Mari Carmen, was forcibly ejected from the property she had lived in for 70 years by an avaricious vulture fund (Spanish owned) Street protests have erupted around the country as a result including a protest in Valencia that finished up with rubber bullets being fired outside a property investment conference (Read the room guys) with 5 arrests and 9 police injuries. The police don't tell us how many protestors were injured.

Mari Carmen has now recovered her home after an agreement was reached but the actions of this particular vulture fund are being repeated around Spain sparking a lot of the protests. Keep an eye out for further news as it happens.

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The home is located inside a private community that also has a it's own swimming pool, but with the beach so close you'd like find yourself tanning and then walking to a nearby lunch spot.