Costa del Sol Market Report

What this issue shows

Across ten municipalities on the Costa del Sol, 22 720 property transactions were registered at the notary over the twelve months to May 2026. Just under half of the buyers — 49.7% — came from outside Spain.

Asking prices sat 24% above what buyers actually paid in Marbella, the widest gap we measure. The coast is not one market: annual price growth ranged from 2.7% in Nerja to 24.4% in Manilva. And a local household would need between 7.2 and 22.7 years of net income to buy a median home here, depending entirely on which town it chose.

Market correction · Section 1

The gap between asking and paid

Every portal publishes asking prices. The price at which a property actually changes hands is recorded at the notary and published monthly by the Consejo General del Notariado — free, official, and read by almost nobody, because it arrives as a PDF of charts rather than as an answer to what someone should offer.

We compare the two across the coast. Resale apartments, May 2026:

A caution on reading this. The gap is not a discount waiting to be claimed. Some properties sell at the asking price — prime locations, motivated buyers, correctly priced stock. Others sit for two years and then move at a third off. The figure describes the width of the room a buyer is negotiating in, and it varies street by street within the same town.

Casares, Manilva and Nerja are absent from this table: our catalogue holds too few active listings in those municipalities to compute a reliable asking median.

Buyer profile · Section 2

Who buys

Five buyers in six who bought in Benahavís were not Spanish. In Málaga city, one in six. The two places are an hour apart by car and represent entirely different housing markets — one where foreigners are the market, the other where they are a minority.

The median buyer is 51. Half the people buying here are older than that.

It is worth stating plainly, because most property marketing on this coast is written as though the audience were thirty and buying a first home. The registered transactions say otherwise.

Growth · Section 3

Price growth

Manilva rose 24.4% over the year. Nerja rose 2.7%. They are on the same coast road.

Fast growth and reliable growth are not the same thing. Manilva's figure comes off roughly a thousand registered sales and a low base — a handful of expensive transactions moves it noticeably. Marbella's 7.7% rests on more than four thousand sales and is a far steadier number. The honest reading is that the smaller towns are volatile, not simply better.

What the spread does show is where the coast is stretching. The established triangle — Marbella, Benahavís, Estepona — has been premium for decades. Growth is now concentrated at its edges.

Affordability · Section 4

Affordability

Years of net household income required to buy a median home:

Benahavís at 22.7 years has stopped being a housing statistic. It is the reason a Spanish family and a Dutch one looking at the same street are having two different conversations.

Yield · Section 5

Rental yield

Gross yield, computed from active listings in our own catalogue — median annual rent against median sale price by zone:

Three zones show no figure. A median computed from five rental listings is not a median, so we publish nothing rather than a number that looks precise.

Two things this yield is not. It is gross — before tax, management, vacancy and community fees. And it is computed from asking prices on both sides, while actual purchases close below asking. Real yield on a well-negotiated purchase is therefore higher than the figure shown, which is why we publish the conservative version.

Methodology

How these figures were built

Transaction prices, growth rates, foreign-buyer shares, buyer age and affordability come from the Portal Estadístico del Notariado, operated by the Consejo General del Notariado. Figures cover the twelve months to May 2026 and are drawn from resale apartment reports unless stated otherwise. The source publishes monthly with roughly a three-month lag.

Asking medians and rental yields are computed from EDENOVO's own active catalogue — 11 614 listings at the time of writing — using the median of price per square metre across individual properties, not a ratio of aggregates. Apartment-family stock only: plots and commercial premises are excluded, as their price per square metre is not comparable.

Growth rates are the source's own year-on-year calculation over its full dataset, not our approximation from two snapshots.

Coverage: all ten municipalities. New-build figures are reported where the notarial source has sufficient transaction volume; in Benahavís and Nerja the new-build segment is too thin to be reported separately — fewer than two dozen registered sales a year in each.

Figures in this issue are fixed as at May 2026. Live figures, updated monthly, are at edenovo.com/investors.