Alicante Is Now Spain's #1 Market for Foreign Buyers — Here's the Data

Every quarter, official Spanish sources — the Land Registrars' statistics, the Ministry of Housing, the Bank of Spain, the Notaries — publish the raw numbers behind who's buying property in Spain, and where. We pull those numbers together into the Costa Blanca Market Report, so you don't have to read four different PDFs in Spanish to find out what's actually happening in the market you're buying into.

This quarter's edition has a headline that matters if you're weighing whether to buy now or wait: two independent official sources, using two different methodologies, have both just confirmed the same thing. Alicante is Spain's number one province for foreign buyers.

46.43% of every sale in Alicante now goes to a foreign buyer

That's the official share from the Land Registrars' statistics (Estadística Registral Inmobiliaria) for the second quarter of 2026 — every type of buyer, every type of property, across the whole province. It's not a niche of the market anymore. Coastal Alicante is close to being an even split between Spanish and foreign buyers.

We told the story behind that record — the developments running out of stock, the price lists moving overnight — in this week's market report.

The Índice Legado de Compra Internacional: 33.1%

The registrars' number tells you about sales. We wanted to know something sharper: what share of the entire housing market in Alicante — new and resale, every transaction recorded by a notary — is bought by someone who doesn't live in Spain. We built that number from the Ministry of Housing's own transaction data and gave it a name, because it's the one figure we track every quarter: the Índice Legado de Compra Internacional.

Right now it stands at 33.1%. One in three homes sold in the province goes to a non-resident.

The Bank of Spain just confirmed it, independently

Here's why that number matters beyond us. In its 2025 Annual Report, the Bank of Spain — using its own data from the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, a source we don't touch — measured non-resident purchases across every Spanish province. Alicante came out on top: 33.3%, ahead of Málaga (27.9%) and more than four times the national average (7.4%).

Two different institutions, two different data sources, the same conclusion within a decimal point: nowhere in Spain do non-residents buy a bigger slice of the housing market than in Alicante.

The Bank of Spain's report adds a second fact that explains the pressure you'll feel if you're house-hunting here: Alicante is one of just six provinces — with Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Murcia and Málaga — that together account for 52.5% of Spain's accumulated housing shortage, estimated at 750,000 homes. Demand concentrated in a market that isn't building enough to meet it is exactly the combination that keeps prices climbing.

New-build costs 66% more than resale — and that gap is the market telling you something

Our second tracked figure, the Prima de Obra Nueva Legado, compares the real notarial price per square metre of new-build against resale property across the province. This quarter: new-build averages 66% more than resale.

That premium isn't a marketing number — it's the price buyers are actually paying at the notary, and it's the clearest sign of how scarce good new-build stock has become relative to demand. If you're considering buying off-plan in Spain, that gap is worth understanding before you start comparing floor plans. Developer pricing on new-build only moves one direction as a project nears completion — it doesn't come back down once the building is finished.