Property prices in Spain 2026: what a square meter costs in Valencia and on the Costa Blanca

Method: three different prices for the same apartment

Any discussion of prices has to start here, or the conversation goes nowhere: people end up comparing things that are not comparable.

Spain routinely calculates three different prices for one and the same home, and they do not agree.

Asking price. What the listing says on a portal or in an agency catalog. idealista, Fotocasa, and we ourselves publish it. This is what the seller wants, with room to negotiate built in.

Sale price. The amount recorded in the deed signed before a Spanish notary, the public official who formalizes the sale, and filed with the Land Registry, Spain's public property register. The land registrars' professional body (Colegio de Registradores) compiles it, and its members are public officials; the INE price index is built on the same sale prices. This is the only price that actually happened.

Appraised value (valor tasado). An independent appraiser's valuation for the bank on a mortgage. Spain's Ministry of Housing aggregates it. It is more conservative than the market and lags behind it.

From here on I mark which of the three I am using. Our catalog is asking prices, and I am not going to pretend they are market prices.

The cost of property in Spain: official appraisal and sale-price statistics by province

Geography first, or the numbers will blur together. The region is called the Valencian Community (Comunitat Valenciana) and it consists of three provinces: Valencia, Alicante, and Castellón. Valencia province contains a city of the same name, its capital, and the city is more expensive than the provincial average, so the word "Valencia" below means the province in some places and the city in others; I flag which one each time. Costa Blanca is the name for the coastline of Alicante province together with the towns behind it, and official statistics have no separate line for it.

Data for the first quarter of 2026.

Sources: Ministry of Housing, Estadística de Valor Tasado de Vivienda, Q1 2026; Association of Land Registrars, Q1 2026. Sale prices for the three provinces come from the registrars' regional release of May 7, 2026: the national release does not carry them. Both sources publish means, not medians.

Three things are worth taking away from this table.

First: the Valencian Community is cheaper than the Spanish average, by roughly 18% on appraised value. Madrid, Barcelona, and the Balearics pull the national figure up.

Second: the spread inside the region is enormous. Castellón is a quarter cheaper than Alicante on appraised value and a third cheaper on sale prices. This is not "the coast" as one thing; these are three different markets.

Third: in Valencia the appraised value and the sale price have moved apart in opposite directions. Appraisers say 1,930.6, and actual sales close at 1,843. Alicante is the other way around: sales run above appraisals. The reason lies in the structure of demand, and I come back to it below.

Record prices, stalling sales

The figure of the year for the region: up 17.2% over twelve months in the appraisal statistics. The INE index of sale prices gives the Valencian Community a more modest but still high 14.3%, against 12.9% nationally.

The record is in the level rather than the pace: current prices have passed the 2008 peak, the high point before the market crashed. Comparable rates of increase were seen in the years leading up to that crash.

The INE breakdown for Spain holds a more important detail: prices of new construction rose 9.1% and resale prices 13.5%. The second figure is a record for the index series, which begins in 2007. INE does not publish that breakdown separately for the Valencian Community. Normally new housing rises faster; right now the opposite is happening, and that signals a shortage of supply rather than a construction boom.

Now for the thing that rarely sits next to headlines about rising prices. The number of sales is contracting, though the fall is running out of steam. According to INE data for May 2026, the Valencian Community recorded 8,669 transactions, 10.8% fewer than a year earlier. In June the fall stopped: 8,558 transactions, level with June a year earlier, while Spain as a whole recorded 1.6% more. For the first half of the year the country is still 2.6% down.

A market where prices are setting records while volume contracts behaves in a particular way: sellers hold their price, buyers wait, and deals become rarer and slower. For a buyer that does not mean "grab something before it gets more expensive." It means negotiation now takes longer, and the list of properties where you can genuinely reach an agreement has narrowed.

Our catalog data: asking prices by town

Here our own data begins, and you can check it: this is the sfero.es catalog as of August 5, 2026, 184 properties for sale, of which 161 went into the price-per-meter calculation: apartments and houses with a stated floor area. I use the median rather than the mean. The median takes the middle of the list: half the properties are more expensive, half cheaper. A single villa at 2.6 million would skew a mean; it does not move a median.

Asking prices, SFERO catalog, 161 properties, snapshot of August 5, 2026. The "Range" column shows the cheapest and the most expensive meter in the sample. Castellón has only 13 properties, so the "Castellón" row describes our catalog and not the province.

By town, wherever the catalog holds at least four properties:

The caveat without which this table reads wrong: the town samples are small. Five properties in Jávea do not describe the Jávea market; they describe our catalog in Jávea. Treat the town figures as a rough guide, not as a precise market number.

The last row looks absurd and explains itself: Godella has the lowest median price per meter of any town in the catalog and, at the same time, a median property price of 1.3 million euros. What sells there is large houses with land, and their meters are cheaper than the meters in an apartment by the sea; there are simply a great many more of them.

Why our numbers run above the official ones

Put the two tables side by side and the gap jumps out. The official sale price for Valencia province is 1,843 euros per meter. The median in our catalog is 2,976. Our numbers are 61% higher.

This is not an error and it is not markup. The gap has three causes, and all three are worth understanding.

Cause one: a listing is always more expensive than a deed. In July 2026 El País matched idealista listings against notarial sale prices across 57 cities. Nationally, listings came out roughly 15% above closings. In the city of Valencia the gap is about 23%, in the city of Alicante 25 to 30%, in Madrid only 11%, and in Granada a full 35%. These are city figures and cannot be carried over to a whole province, but they set the order of magnitude.

And here begins the part that gets misread most often. A 25% gap is not the discount you will be given. It most likely combines two different things: genuine negotiation, and overpriced listings that hang around for months, drag the average up, and end up not selling anyway. Let me be straight about it: nobody has published a breakdown of that gap into its two parts, so this is an explanation and not a measurement.

So how much do sellers actually come down? According to Tecnocasa network data for 2024, the average discount off the asking price was about 7.5% (8.4% the year before). That is one agency network and two-year-old figures, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a benchmark. A second measurement adds a caveat: in the Fotocasa Research survey of November 2025, only 52% of buyers tried to negotiate at all; of those who did, 83% got something off, but for 77% the move away from the asking price stayed within 10%. In other words, roughly a quarter of the buyers who negotiated moved further than ten points, in one direction or the other. The conclusion holds either way: negotiation is normally measured in single-digit percentages, not in a quarter of the price.

Cause two: our catalog is not the average housing stock of a province. Provincial statistics count everything: old apartments in villages far from the coast, unrenovated homes, properties an international buyer will never see. We work in a narrow segment, the coast and the city of Valencia. That segment is more expensive than the average by definition.

This claim can be tested, and the test does not favor us on every line. Let's compare our medians not with recorded sales but with the asking prices of the largest portal, that is, like with like.

Our data: snapshot of August 5, 2026. All portal figures are for May 2026: Costa Blanca towns as reported by a trade publication, the city of Valencia as reported by Levante-EMV. A private source, not a public one. The idealista index is calculated on resale listings, while our catalog also holds new construction, so the comparison is approximate.

The picture comes out mixed, which is exactly what an honest comparison should look like. In the city of Valencia and in Jávea our properties sit below the portal level. In Torrevieja and Dénia they sit clearly above it, and the explanation is simple: in those towns we hold five and ten properties, and not the most modest ones, while the portal counts the entire town stock, including older apartments farther back from the seafront.

The general conclusion from the table: the gap against official sale statistics comes down mostly to the type of price and to the segment. What the table cannot prove is that our properties are not, on average, more expensive than the market: we sit below the portal where we hold the most properties, that is, in the city of Valencia, and more often above it in the small coastal samples.

Cause three, a technical one: the periods do not match. Our catalog is an August 2026 snapshot, while official sale prices are from the first quarter. At around 15% growth a year, that adds a few more percentage points to the gap.

What to do with all of this in practice:

• official statistics are for understanding where the market is heading and for comparing provinces with each other;
• listing prices are for seeing what prices properties are actually being offered at where you are looking;
• on an individual purchase, plan on paying roughly 5 to 10% below a sensibly set asking price. A quarter off happens where a property was overpriced from the start, and those properties usually do not sell at all.

House vs. apartment: the reversal nobody expects

One of the most frequent questions at a first consultation is which makes more sense on the coast, an apartment or a house. People usually assume the house is the more expensive option. The data says otherwise, and the reason is more interesting.

Asking prices, SFERO catalog, 161 properties, snapshot of August 5, 2026.

A meter in a house costs nearly a third less than a meter in an apartment. And the total price of the house is still almost double, because you are buying 240 square meters instead of 89.

Something practical follows from that, and it rarely gets said out loud. If you count your budget in square meters, the house wins. If you count it as a total, the house loses. And if you genuinely need 240 meters, a house is not a luxury: it is the cheapest way to get them.

There is a flip side too, and it is not in the purchase price: a house costs more to maintain, the garden and the pool need attention, and it is harder to rent out.

From SFERO's practice. At a first consultation we break the question down differently from the way it usually arrives. Not "apartment or house," but "how many meters do you actually need and how often will you be here." The answer drives the property type, the town, and the final figure. Want us to run those numbers for your own situation? Message us on WhatsApp at +34 664 02 87 80 or open the catalog with the budget filter.

Alicante: nearly half of all buyers come from abroad

The figure that explains the whole coastal price picture: foreign buyers accounted for 44.65% of all transactions in Alicante province in the first quarter of 2026. That is the highest share in Spain, on Association of Land Registrars data.

In Alicante the sale price (2,214 €/m²) sits above the appraised value (1,991.7); in Valencia it is the other way around. To be fair, a sale price above an appraisal is not in itself an anomaly: Spain as a whole looks the same (2,429 against 2,315.7), because bank valuations are conservative by design. The anomaly is rather in Valencia, where sales close below appraisals. To see why, you need to know how a Spanish bank calculates: it lends against the lower of two amounts, the price in the contract and its own appraisal. If the appraiser comes in below what the seller is asking, the buyer either covers the difference in cash or pushes the price down. Where most purchases run on a Spanish mortgage, the appraisal works as a ceiling on price, and Valencia province behaves exactly that way. In Alicante the foreign buyer more often arrives with their own money or with a loan from their home country, never meets that ceiling, and sales drift above appraisals. This is a hypothesis; there is no direct statistical confirmation of it.

The practical consequence: on the Alicante coast you are competing not with the local market but with an international one. Going by the provincial average price there is pointless, and the local economy does not steer these prices: the demand is not coming from it. That does not make the market invulnerable. It is simply tied to somebody else's cycles, to eurozone interest rates, and to the economies the buyers come from.

The flip side of the Valencian picture: the fact that sales there close below bank appraisals does not, contrary to what you might expect, leave more room to negotiate. The gap between listing and deed in the city of Valencia is in fact narrower than in Alicante, around 23% against 25 to 30%. The upside in Valencia is that a Spanish mortgage is easier: the appraisal comes in above the price, and the loan does not run into it.

What your budget buys: turning euros into meters

The most practical cut of the report. I take the median price per meter for each town from our catalog and divide a budget by it. The result is the floor area to plan on at current asking prices.

Calculated on the medians of towns with five or more properties in the catalog. Godella meets that threshold but is not in the table: its median meter belongs to large houses with a median property price of 1.3 million euros, and using it to calculate how many meters a budget of 200,000 to 500,000 euros buys would be meaningless. Asking prices, SFERO catalog, snapshot of August 5, 2026.

If you are pricing this in another currency, the three budget columns come to roughly $220,000, $330,000, and $550,000 at about $1.10 to the euro, or about £170,000, £255,000, and £425,000 at about 85p, using the rates this report was updated with. One square meter is about 10.8 square feet if you think in those units. Exchange rates move, so recheck before you budget.

One important caveat about the table: this is the price of the property itself. Taxes and transaction costs are added on top and need a separate reserve: in the Valencian Community they come to about 10% of the price on a resale and 11 to 12% on new construction. The line-by-line breakdown is in a separate article, which is in preparation.

A check against the facts rather than the formula: in the catalog itself, below the 200,000 mark there are currently 24 properties with a median floor area of 71 m²; between 200,000 and 300,000, 38 properties with a median of 72 m²; and between 300,000 and 500,000, 43 properties with a median of 103 m².

The calculation and the facts disagree, and they disagree differently in each bracket. The comparison is not quite direct either: the formula works on a single town, while this check takes the whole catalog at once, all three provinces together. Even so, below 200,000 the actual median comes out larger than the figure calculated for Valencia (71 m² against 64), and in the middle bracket the opposite happens. Real listings are spread unevenly, so use the formula as a guide and not as a promise.

What this means if you are buying

Three things that do not follow on their own from the tables above.

Being flexible about the town translates directly into meters. A meter in Dénia is a third more expensive than a meter in the city of Valencia, and in meters that looks like this: the same 300,000 euros buy 96 square meters in the city and 71 by the sea in Dénia. That is not "more expensive or cheaper," it is twenty-five specific meters, which is to say a room.

Negotiate in single-digit percentages and do not expect a miracle. The benchmark is 5 to 10% off a sensibly set price. If the seller will not move at all, it is usually cheaper to go to another property than to keep pushing: a seller who is holding out on price rarely moves.

Count in meters, not in price tags. Two properties at 350,000 euros each can differ by a factor of two in floor area. The town medians in the table above are a rough guide to the order of magnitude, not a market index: a sample of five or ten properties describes our catalog, not the town. To sanity-check a specific offer, use the official statistics and live listings in that same neighborhood.

What I say at a first meeting. The conversation almost always opens with "what are prices doing right now," and it becomes useful when it gets turned around: how many meters you need, how many months a year you will be here, and whether you are ready for a negotiation that runs for months. From there the figures in this report turn into a short list of towns and properties. Want us to run those numbers for your own case? Message us on WhatsApp at +34 664 02 87 80 or open the catalog with the budget filter and run the numbers yourself: every catalog figure in this report comes from there.

How this report was calculated

So that the figures can be checked and reproduced.

Our data: the sfero.es catalog, snapshot of August 5, 2026. There were 184 properties for sale in total. Of those, 161 went into the price-per-meter calculation: apartments and houses with a stated floor area. Land plots and commercial units are excluded. The price per meter for each property is its listing price divided by the floor area shown on its listing. That area is whatever the owner or the developer declared, and I have not verified that every property was measured to the same standard. I use the median rather than the arithmetic mean, so that a few expensive properties do not distort the picture. Town figures were calculated only where the catalog holds four properties or more; in the table that turns a budget into meters, the threshold rises to five.

What this data does not show: it does not describe the market as a whole. These are the asking prices of one agency in one segment. For market conclusions, use the official statistics in the sources below.

Period of the official data: the first quarter of 2026 for prices, June 2026 for transaction counts. Releases published after the report was calculated are not in it and will go into the next edition.

Updating: the report is recalculated when the next quarterly releases from the registrars and INE come out.

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