Property sales fell by 22% in 2020 in the Canary Islands

Property buying and selling transactions fell by 21.9% in the whole of 2020 in the Canary Islands, standing at 16,645 operations, according to data published on Monday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

In all of Spain, a year marked since March by the coronavirus pandemic throughout 2020, the decrease was 17.7%, the largest drop since 2011, when accounting for 415,748 purchases, the lowest figure since 2016, according to the data.

Despite this drop, this is not as bad a collapse as compared to the previous economic crisis, when in 2008, as a result of the bursting of the real estate bubble, when it sank by almost 29%, highlights the INE.

The data also shows that, although 2020 closed with falls compared to 2019, in December of last year the sale of residential homes grew by an average of 3.7% year-on-year in the whole of Spain, although this is not the case in the archipelago.

In fact, in December, sales only fell in 5 regions of the country with the Balearic Islands (-20%) and the Canary Islands (-16.5%) leading the declines. There were however some increases in various parts of the country, where La Rioja (+37.2%), Galicia (+28.8%) and Cantabria (+28.3%) led the rise in property transactions.