Appraised home values set a record of €2,355/m² after a 12.5% rise: 15 quarters of increases and the first sign of moderation

19/09/2026 – ⏱ 7 min

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation of any kind.

House prices in Spain set a new all-time high again, but with a nuance that has not appeared in the series until now. The appraised value of free housing stood at 2,355 euros per square metre in the second quarter of 2026, 12.5% more than in the same period of the previous year, according to the statistics published by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda. It is the fifteenth consecutive quarter of increases and the sixth above the 2,000-euro threshold. What is new is not the record but the pace: both the year-on-year and the quarterly rates slow at the same time for the first time in the current cycle.

What exactly this statistic measures

Before reading the figures, the source should be placed in context, because the Spanish residential market has at least four price indicators that do not measure the same thing. The Ministry's appraised-value statistic is built from the reports of the valuation companies belonging to the Spanish Association of Valuation Analysis (AEV); this quarter, 177,112 home appraisals were used. It is not an asking price — what is requested on a property portal — nor a registered transaction price, such as that reflected by notaries and registrars, nor a constant-quality index such as the INE's House Price Index. It is the value that professionals attribute to the property in the reports that serve as the basis, among other uses, for granting mortgages. That nature makes it especially relevant for those analysing financing: it is the value on which loan-to-value ratios are calculated.

The figure for the quarter and the slowdown that accompanies it

The 12.5% year-on-year increase is below the 13.9% recorded in the first quarter of 2026 and the 13.1% of the preceding quarter. The moderation is more visible in the quarterly comparison: the price rises 1.7% between April and June, against the 3.8% it had advanced between January and March. In other words, the market keeps getting more expensive, but at less than half the quarter-on-quarter speed of the previous three months. That inflection coincides in time with quarterly declines in both the number of home sales and the number of mortgages signed, which points to a moderation on the side of solvent demand rather than a turn in supply.

No region falls, but the map is reordered

In year-on-year terms, all seventeen autonomous communities and both autonomous cities close the quarter in positive territory. The sharpest rises are concentrated outside the traditional large markets: the Valencian Community leads with 15.8%, followed by Castilla y León (15.1%), Castilla-La Mancha (14.7%), Cantabria (14.6%), Aragon (14.6%), the Canary Islands (14.2%) and Asturias (14%). At the other end, only three territories advance by less than 10%: Ceuta and Melilla (7.8%), Extremadura (8.3%) and Navarre (8.5%). In the comparison with the previous quarter, the largest increases also correspond to Castilla y León (4.6%) and Castilla-La Mancha (3.7%).

In absolute levels the order does not change. The Community of Madrid closes the quarter with the most expensive square metre, 4,089.6 euros, followed by the Balearic Islands (3,980.8) and the Basque Country (3,102.3). The distance between the ceiling and the floor of the regional map remains the most persistent structural feature of the series: there are regions where a square metre costs more than three times as much as in others in the same country.

Capitals with stressed-market areas rise less than the average

The Ministry highlights a pattern that deserves careful examination: in every provincial capital where stressed residential market areas have been declared under the Housing Rights Law, growth in the price per square metre is below the national average of 12.5%. The figures are Pamplona (5.2%), Girona (6.4%), Vitoria (6.5%), Barcelona (6.9%), A Coruña (7.6%), Bilbao (7.9%), San Sebastián (8.5%) and Lleida (9.9%). The department's reading is that the rent-containment and affordable-supply expansion measures are accompanying this moderation.

It is worth noting, without entering the public-policy debate, that the group of capitals with stressed-market areas largely coincides with markets that already started from higher price levels and a longer upward run, where deceleration is also the statistically expected behaviour of a mature market. The published data do not allow the two effects to be separated, and the statistic itself is not designed to measure the causal impact of a regulation.

New build, second-hand and subsidised housing

By age of the property, free housing up to five years old stood at 2,736.6 euros per square metre, 12.1% more than a year earlier, while that of more than five years advanced 12.5% to 2,342.5 euros. The difference between the two paces is minimal, which indicates that the price increase is not explained solely by the tightening of new-build supply: the second-hand stock is rising practically as fast. Subsidised housing, for its part, closed the quarter at 1,247 euros per square metre, 5% more than in the second quarter of 2025, less than half the pace of the free market, and with a price equivalent to a little over half the average market value.

The municipal extremes illustrate the dispersion of the Spanish market better than any average. Among municipalities with more than 25,000 inhabitants, the most expensive is Santa Eulalia del Río (Balearic Islands), at 6,844.4 euros per square metre; the most affordable, Villarrobledo (Albacete), at 665.5 euros. The ratio between the two exceeds ten times.

The financial context: more expensive credit just as prices moderate

The slowdown in the quarter cannot be read apart from what has happened in the interest-rate market. The European Central Bank raised official rates by 25 basis points at its meeting on 10 September 2026, leaving the deposit facility at 2.50%, the main refinancing operations rate at 2.65% and the marginal lending facility at 2.90%. The twelve-month Euribor, the benchmark for most variable-rate mortgages in Spain, exceeded 3.1% for the first time in the following sessions after closing August at 2.954%. A higher financing cost makes both the buyer's monthly payment and the developer's debt more expensive, and its effect on prices usually appears with a lag of several quarters.

On the transactions side, the registrars' statistics put July home sales at around 60,500 operations, 7.7% fewer than a year earlier and the largest year-on-year decline in more than two years. On the future supply side, the signal goes the other way: new-build housing permits grew 21.36% in the first half of 2026 to 72,056 units, according to the Spanish Higher Council of Architects' Associations, the best building figure since 2019. Fewer sales, more expensive credit and more projected construction make up a picture different from that of the preceding quarters.

Why this matters to the real-estate investor

Of all the price indicators, appraised value is the one most directly related to the financing of a project. It determines the base on which the loan-to-value percentage is calculated and therefore conditions how much equity a developer needs to build a development and what safety margin a lender has if the asset has to be liquidated. An appraised value that keeps rising, even at a slower pace, supports the valuations of assets in portfolio; a prolonged slowdown narrows the cushion between the appraisal value and the real cost of construction and land.

For those analysing real-estate crowdfunding transactions, the combination described by these data has two concrete implications. The first affects the numerator of any return calculation: if sale prices advance more slowly, the margins forecast in business plans drawn up on assumptions of 13% annual appreciation are exposed to revision. The second affects the denominator: with the Euribor above 3%, the cost of bank debt rises and with it the return that private capital demands to assume an equivalent risk. When a platform publishes a target return, that figure should be understood as the developer's estimate of the outcome of a specific project; this estimate is subject to investment risk and is not guaranteed.

The geographical shift in the increases adds a third element. That the Valencian Community, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Cantabria and Aragon top the ranking while Barcelona, Bilbao or San Sebastián stay below the average is consistent with what other residential indicators for 2026 show: lower-entry markets now concentrate the greatest price pressure. They are also markets with a smaller volume of transactions, where the same percentage change rests on a smaller sample base.

A reading for the investor

These figures call for prudence in their interpretation. They are appraisal values, not prices actually registered: they measure what professionals estimate a property to be worth at the time of issuing the report, a magnitude that may differ from both the asking price and the final price of the transaction. Appraisals are also concentrated in properties linked to a financing process, which introduces a composition bias with respect to the housing stock as a whole. And a national average of 2,355 euros per square metre groups together realities ranging from 665 to almost 6,845 euros, so it hardly describes any specific market.

Past results do not predict future ones. All real-estate investment carries risks of illiquidity, delays, default and total or partial loss of the capital invested, and neither a price record nor a series of fifteen quarters of increases eliminates any of them. At European level, the activity of crowdfunding platforms is governed by Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 and, in Spain, by the implementing legislation and CNMV supervision, including Circular 2/2020.

Realty Investor

Your real estate crowdfunding, in one app.

Discover new opportunities. Invest through leading platforms. Manage your whole property portfolio from a single place.

The Realty Investor beta is now available. Explore the market, discover new projects and get to know the platform with simulated money, without putting in any capital.

Download the beta and start discovering a new way to manage your real estate investments.