🏗️ 5 Changes Coming to Spain’s Boiling Property Market

From hitting the outskirts to hating on the foreigners

Madrid | Sept. 8, 2025

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Every little box tells a story. Photo by Francisco Moreno on Unsplash

Spain’s property market is boiling. Here are 5 changes coming to it

Spain’s property market isn’t cooling down—it’s boiling over. And while the government’s rent caps, tax tweaks, and headline-making mega-developments like Madrid’s Nuevo Norte grab attention, the reality is simpler: people are being priced out of where they want to live, and they’re scrambling for alternatives. The pressure points aren’t just in Madrid and Barcelona anymore—they’re spreading like an oil stain into suburbs, commuter towns, and entirely different cities. That means the map of “affordable” housing is about to look very different, and not necessarily for the better.

Let’s start with the first shift.

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1. 🏡 Locals will head to the peripheries of big cities

“Living in Madrid is a luxury now.” — renter Vinicius Silva to El País on looking beyond the M-40.

It’s a classic squeeze: prices in city centres are already high, and mass tourism pushes them even higher. In Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga, Valencia and Sevilla, locals are heading to the edges — not for the romance of a long commute, but because it’s the only place they can (sort of) afford.

There are numbers to prove it. Some 36,000 people left Barcelona for other towns in Catalonia between 2021 and 2023; during the same period, Barcelona’s second ring Vallès and Maresme areas have gained 15,000 residents. The towns of Sabadell (+974), Vilanova i la Geltrú (+713) and Terrassa (+634) have been big winners of intra-Catalonia migration.

Why? Prices, obvs. José Alberto Marín, who leads Catalonia’s notaries association, told La Vanguardia that his group’s database showed that the price to buy a house drops by half just 30km outside of Barcelona.

“One of the solutions to improve access to housing is called public transportation.” — José Alberto Marín

And it’s not just Barcelona, with its stifling overtourism, where locals are fleeing the city. New data from Idealista shows the most in-demand rental zones, as measured by the most renter interest per listing, are increasingly outside the core. Nine of Spain’s 10 most in-demand rental areas are in Madrid or Barcelona’s peripheries — Leganés leads the list. Barcelona and Madrid themselves? They are way down, at #20 and #32, respectively. And while Spain’s Big 2 may be the trend-setters, it’s happening everywhere from Valencia to Sevilla and Málaga too.

But there’s a problem with this plan—those cheaper outskirts aren’t staying cheap. In many commuter towns, rental prices are rising faster than in the cities they surround (see chart above). And when it comes to sale prices, 47% of municipalities of over 25,000 people saw 10%+ year-over-year increases during the last quarter of 2024—for example, Valencia outskirts Manises (27,8%), Mislata (27,3%), Xirivella (26,7%), and Burjassot (25,7%) saw over 25% annual increases. In parts of Madrid’s southeast, average prices have tripled in a decade—in Ensanche de Vallecas, the price has risen from €143,000 in 2014 to over €430,000 today.

So it might be time for another workaround…

2. 🏘️ Locals will skip the suburbs entirely — and move to smaller cities

The old escape plan from big-city housing hell was simple: move to the edge of town. Now, more Spaniards are blowing past the beltways and heading for smaller provincial capitals — places that once bled residents and are suddenly stealing them.

Take Valladolid. After decades of losing people to Madrid, it flipped the script, growing its population by 5,000 in the last two years and posting a positive migration balance with the capital (of +491) for the first time, like, ever? Credit high-speed rail (under an hour to Madrid) and Madrid’s brutal housing market.

The trend isn’t limited to Valladolid. Madrid lost nearly 21,000 residents to other Spanish towns in 2023; Barcelona’s balance was also negative (-11,553). The leavers aren’t 20-somethings — they’re mostly 35+, university-educated, and trading cramped flats for bigger homes and saner mortgages.

Eight small capitals — Lugo, Cáceres, Guadalajara, Toledo, Ciudad Real, Huesca, Soria and Teruel — reached record high populations in 2024. Ourense brought in 3,155 people from other parts of Spain in 2023, including 755 from Madrid and 615 from Catalonia, and Asturias is now the second-most popular destination for internal migration.

Affordability may be the hook — but it’s fading fast. In many of these “cheap” markets, prices are rising as fast as in the big cities they’re poaching from. In May, Valladolid’s average sale price was 7.8% higher than a year earlier, with its hottest neighborhoods up more than 20%. “There are fewer and fewer affordable options for those who want to buy a home, and this translates into greater tension in large cities, but also in medium-sized ones,” says Simone Colombelli, mortgages director of iAhorro. Today’s bargain could be tomorrow’s next housing headache.

3. 💸 Landlords will pull more apartments off the market in “stressed” areas

Surprising no one, when the government passed a 2023 housing law letting regions cap rents in “stressed” areas — places where rents gobble more than 30% of average income and are rising faster than inflation — landlords didn’t exactly throw a party. Instead, many yanked their flats from the market and went hunting for better-paying gigs.