Sean Woolley – With me as always, Mark Stücklin from Spanish Property Insight. And our aim with this podcast is to cover everything to do with Spanish Property. Mark is the go-to guy for all the stats and the data, so he can give us an idea of how the market is performing with the stats that he has available. And I can give my insight on how things are going on the ground. Sometimes they differ slightly, sometimes they bear no relation at all to each other. But it’s very interesting just to get the two perspectives. So welcome along, Mark, Happy New Year.

Mark Stücklin – Likewise, Sean, always a pleasure to talk to you.

– You very kindly drilled down on some data for us relating to the performance of the Spanish property market last year. So we’re recording this coming up to the end of January, 2024, but I think a lot of people, a lot of our clients are interested to know, how is 2023? So over to you, sir.

– Well, we don’t have the full figures for 2023. There’s always a delay in reporting, it’s fairly understandable. There’s a lot of sales, for example, on the sales fund, a lot of data has to come in from the different regions through the different gathering sources which would be the notaries or the registrars, or other sources of information. They all become collected by whoever’s. There’s mainly the registrars, notaries and the government, which has now used to be called MITMA. It’s now the back to the Ministry of Vivienda, so I now just refer to all data from the government as just government data rather than referring to the ministry or the office, because they keep changing the name, heard enough of it.

– Yeah.

– But what we do have is figures for the first 11 months of 2023.

– Okay, that’s good.

– December’s missing, we got the picture of the year. We’ll see what December brings, where it’ll come, it’ll be next month. In February, we’ll have the full year figures on sales and also on prices, on sales prices, which also come from the notaries. And so in February we’ll be able to close out the year for good. But right now, the picture’s in and nothing much is going to change. So what I suggest we do is, I’ve got prepared a little presentation, we go through those slides in which we look at sales and prices at a national level and also at a regional level in Andalusia and Marbella. I’ll tell you what the data says, and you tell me how you’re seeing that data on the ground.

– Perfect! Sounds like a plan. Great!

– Okay. First thing to look at, let’s see. Everyone always wants to know what’s happening to house prices, are they going up or down? So this is how these average national price for Spain as a whole taken using data from the notaries and it’s for November. And so the black columns show the average price per square metre, in euros per square metre. And the blue area line, which uses the right axis shows Spain year on year change. So what we see here is, I mean, this goes back all the way to the tail end of that crazy boom in the notaries. And you can see that, that by this time, by the beginning of 2008, prices were already sliding. And you can see there was this long crisis and prices went down from, I mean, continued declining right, until 2015. And then there was this sort of long period of slow recovery and then you had the COVID dip, and then this amazing kind of extraordinary boom that came in the wake of the pandemic. And that well lasted until last year, and then a few bit, but it’s basically petered out. And so November we saw a decline in prices as an average nationwide of 1% which is nothing dramatic, but you can see that that’s what’s happened. That’s the story, this big increase post pandemic boom in both sales and prices has petered out. So that’s the Spanish national picture, now let’s just look at the regional picture and then I can get your feedback because this will be more closer to your… Well, there’s a couple more slides at the national level and then we’ll get into the idealista data, okay?

– Okay, yeah perfect.

– But if you have any questions whilst we’re going through, you just jump in. This now compares the notaries year on year, so it’s once, we’re still talking a national picture and now we’re talking about quarter three of last year. So September, October, now what would be, Q3 would be July, August, September. And this compares the notaries based on sales prices and a property portal called Idealista based on asking prices. And you can see that in Q3 the sales prices rose 1.8% and asking prices rose 7.5%. You see a bit of a mismatch here at the beginning in 2019, they were both declining and then they had this dip at the beginning when the pandemic hit, but asking prices dip hardly at all. And then they had in the wake of the pandemic, you had this big increase in sales prices whilst asking prices were which of tracking sideways. And since the beginning of 2023 you saw a bigger difference in a big increase in asking prices up in between five and 10% was sales prices, so that’s the average price of property that was sold, witnessed by no trees. One declined by less than 1% I think in the first quarter, but then it’s been in positive territory for the rest of last year. So there’s a bit of a mismatch between asking prices and sales prices. I always treat the notaries data with some scepticism. Well, it’s very volatile from one month to the next, you see the charter jumps up and down, whereas other price indices are a far less volatile. So I don’t know what makes the notary data so volatile, but it is. I dunno if you’re seeing a difference maybe this cut for me, are you seeing any difference between asking prices and sales prices down on your patch?

– No, not a huge difference at the moment. I think we’ve got over that excitable bump in the market that you can see here post Covid where I think it was a seller’s market for sure, there were a lot of buyers looking for stuff, and in certain areas you could almost name your price. I think that’s slackened off a bit now. I think we’re now in a more normalised market and certainly in the areas that we deal in which are very popular sort of middle to high end areas, we’re noticing that there’s not a huge difference in the asking price and the selling price. What I would say though, is that I’m seeing more price reductions, so as you probably know, we get access to various data from the portals. And if I were to look at it over a month, I would say that there might be 10 or 20% price increases, but of the price changes, the rest are reductions and they’re coming off by a kind of average of 4-5% from their peak prices. So I think that that is testament to the fact that maybe there’s not quite as many buyers in the market as there were in that post Covid boom, so vendors are having to get a little bit more realistic about the prices that they’re coming up with. And I think this is all good for the market, we just seem to be entering a more solid, realistic market. There’s not major, major, price reductions, there aren’t bargains around in the best areas, but I think there’s a levelling off on a coming together of the prices.

– What do you think of this idea? It seems to me that in a vendor’s market that the asking price and the sale price should be very close because the vendor’s got the power vendors in the saddle, and so you either pay the asking price or someone else will. In a buyer’s market, there can be quite a spread between what vendors would like to sell for and what they actually get. So this chart seems to suggest that in the post Covid boom, it was very much what would that be? Where sales prices were above. Well it was very much a vendor’s market because sales prices were rising above even vendor expectations, I would say right?

– Yeah, exactly.

– And now we have here since the final quarter of 2024, it’s basically a year and a bit moved into what looks from this chart at least like a buyer’s market, where vendors’ expectations are higher than what their expectations of increases in prices is higher than what their market’s actually delivering.

– Yeah, it’s interesting and of course this is for the whole of Spain. I think there are plenty of markets within that market and I have experience in the Costa del Sol and particularly in that Marbella and Aby Estepona region, which seems to be holding up in terms of interest and activity. So again, it’s difficult to judge, there are so many little areas within these figures.

– Oh yeah, of course segmented market, local markets, segments that everyone’s kind of a world in itself. And these big national averages, they just give you a rough idea of a trend, but I think you know them, there’s probably some truth in the claim that when asking prices are higher than sales prices, it’s a buyer market and vice versa.

– It’s very interesting.

– Anyway, let’s see what, okay, this is an interesting piece of news because this shows the three different price indices with a base year, a base period of 2008, the first quarter of 2008. So what we have is the notaries in blue, so the blue line based on the sales they witnessed, then you have the INE which is the statistics office in green, and that data comes from the registrars, so when a sale is made by a witness by notaries, it then gets inscribed in the land registry and it goes into the registrar’s database. So it’s essentially the same data, but coming from ghost notaries and then the registrar’s, and then to the statistics office. But the registrars for their price index, they use something called the “repeat sale index,” which they only include properties that have been previously sold in a certain timeframe. So they’re kind of comparing like with like rather than, and the notaries don’t do that. And then the red line is the Idealista, so this is asking prices comes from Idealista, which is one of, if not the biggest property portal in Spain. So they all started back there in 2008, which by the way was not the peak of prices. I think prices peaked in 2007 in that boom.

– [Sean Woolley] Yeah.

– But this shows how they’ve changed since then, and interestingly with the inner index, with the green line, they hit a hundred in Q3 of last year. So they’re back to where they were in nominal terms in 2008.

– [Sean] Okay.

– That’s taken them all of these years to recover to where they were in nominal terms. The notaries are at 94, which the notaries of the blue light, so that they still haven’t, prices still haven’t written. Once again, we’re talking about the national price, but the national average still hasn’t recovered to where it was all those years ago. And idealista is almost there, so 97. It’s taken a long time to get back to every work from 2008.

– It’s interesting isn’t it? It’s a 15 year cycle that, and you can see how it’s developed over that time. Yeah, very interesting.

– And of course there’s another indices from the government, but they use valuations and I haven’t included that ’cause four lines on a shark, ’cause it could be a bit complicated but the government’s something that like 64, it’s still weighed down from the values back in 2008. And if these are all in nominal terms, if you adjust them and put them in real terms, I mean that I don’t think it’s 30, it’s still even in inner indexes, you know, is 80 or 75 still in real terms hasn’t recovered to the prices back then. But it was a massive bubble, so not that unusual. It’s not that hard to explain. Anyway, so moving on thou, this is just a quick comparison between regions using the latest sale and asking prices for November, 2023, which is the latest figures we have. So here you can see what you have is the sale price year on year change in black columns and asking price year on year change in the blue column, and organised from the highest to lowest going in terms of sale year on year. So at the top is the Balearics, where sales prices increase basically 10% and asking prices 12%. Valencian region sale prices were up 5% and asking prices 10%. So once again, here you can see this mismatch between our considerable spread, between asking prices and sale prices. Andalusia was a sale prices November 2023, over the year before up 5% and asking prices, 8.5. Murcia, four and a half and eight Madrid might. So now we get into where they went down, Madrid was down 1%, whereas asking prices was still up a bit. Catalonia all down one and a half percent and asking prices is little, and canaries this, I don’t know why but—

– What is going on? And in can in the canary.

– I dunno, sales down 3.3 and asking, there’s a mismatch. Vendors are having, they’re divorced from reality, it looks like, they’re expecting prices to be increasing. But, well, there’s a whole bunch of things going down on the canary, which we won’t get into today, but anyway, there’s a funny different mismatch between what prices are actually doing and what vendors are expecting, unless there’s some glitch in the data that I’m unaware of, which could be when you compare anything with the notaries data, ’cause it’s so volatile. Anyway there under Murcia, you can see sales price is up 5% and asking prices up 8%. Are you seeing that?

– Yeah, I think that’s about right actually. I think, again, kind of steady, but vendors are always more hopeful, aren’t they, when they’re pricing, so I would expect there to be a disparity, which there is in every area, but it’s not too dissimilar. So again, I’m quite thankful to see those figures.

– Right, so assuming that was representative of the last year, is that fair enough to say that and of course this was Andalusia, so when Andalusia breaks down into so many different sub-markets and locations, but let’s say your area, would you say that about a full 5% price increase was more or less would happen?

– Yeah, I would say so. And of course what you find is that vendor sentiment tends to lag a little bit, so they don’t experience, “How many buyers there are in the market?” They just go from the fact that there’s been a Covid boom, so let’s jump on the bandwagon, increase our asking price. But actually by the time they do that, there’s 20% fewer buyers in the market. So it never tells the whole story, but it’s certainly, I think it’s pretty true of seller sentiment, those figures.

– Right, okay. Well it’s good to know that the data that I look at, ’cause I don’t talk to, you know, I’m not on the coalface like you, and I’m not talking to buyers and sellers, so it’s always reassuring to know that there’s some sort of, it’s affirmed that this data is at least in the ballpark.

– Yeah, definitely.

– Moving on, let’s see. So now we get to more specific to your area, Marbella & Sotogrande at this level, the data gets thinner. There is, the government does produce data for prices per municipality, but only municipalities above a certain size, and Marbella would be in there, but just to keep for comparison’s sake, so Marbella & Sotogrande two quite up market destinations in your neck of the woods. What we have here, you can see this is going back to 2012, but even so, you get the idea once again, there was this, the downward, and even in Sotogrande’s case negative at the beginning of pandemic, Marbella never went negative. You can see it came down, it never went, asking prices, never sank into negative territory. And then once things started recovering, just like Marbella close to 20% in some months last year. Once again asking prices, and so December finished off with Marbella up 12%, Sotogrande also up 12%. So that’s for the Marbella area. And what do you see that?

– That accords with what we’ve seen as well, I think what we’ve found in Marbella and in Sotogrande is there’s been a lack of stock, lack of available stock for sale. So since Covid, a lot of people are making a permanent move to these areas and they’re all looking at, well, not all of them, but some of them are looking at schools. And the schools obviously have a finite number of places and a lot of people are buying or making the house purchasing decision on the back of which school their kids are going to go to. Sotogrande has a very, very— It is, and Sotogrande has a very well regarded international school, possibly the best on the Costa del Sol, but there simply isn’t enough housing to cope with the influx of demand. So that’s why I think we’re seeing the asking prices being a little higher in Sotogrande, certainly on the increase. Marbella, because it’s marketed as the California of Europe I think will always outpace Sotogrande, and I think what’s happened also is we’ve seen an increase, obviously an increase in demand in Marbella, but also again, a problem with stock. And I think that’s actually attributable to a lot of people. You know, during the pandemic, I think everyone was thinking the world’s going to end, we need to sell our holiday home in Spain and blah, blah, blah. And of course when the pandemic came to an end and people were able to fly and travel, they realised that, “Oh, we’ve got a holiday home in Spain, let’s go use it.” “Let’s improve our lifestyle.” So a lot of those properties that would normally come onto the market never did, and that impacted the supply of stock. And we’ve got developments that you would normally expect between five and 10% of the built stock to be available for sale at any one time. And we’ve got some prolific developments that there’s a lot of demand for that’s down to one or 2% that’s available for sale. So that obviously keeps the asking prices very, very high,

– Absolutely.

– perhaps even inflated in terms of true figures, but while there’s people willing to spend and be in those areas, then of course vendors are totally within their rights to demand more.

– Absolutely, makes sense. That’s interesting to hear that this idea, people looking for schools are not looking for holiday homes, they’re looking for relocations. Anyway, so we’ll see, I think now let’s talk about prices. And here once again, the national picture, you can see the top graphic chart is Spain sales per month in the black columns and the year on year change in the blue area line, and there’s sales vary considerably from month to month. There’s a lot of seasonality involved, but you get the idea here, there was a dip with Covid, then there was this big surge in price which is making up lost sales and pent up demand from this period, but also this new demand that the pandemic created. But then since then, as you can see, it was lower growth but still growing until the beginning at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, and now year on year, it’s been pretty much negative all of 2023. But it was comparing to an exceptional period of sales in 2022. This negative growth is more a reflection of the boom of 2022 than of any kind of weakness or softness in sales in 2023. So anyway, for what it’s worth, November sales were down seven point a half percent year on year, but if you look at just November, so this is all months from 2019. So that’s the year before the pandemic, this is all the second chart below is just comparing November’s. So this is every November going back to 2007. And in fact, on that scale last November, 2023 was the third best in 15 years.

– Yep, yep. It’s very interesting, and that’s sort of a quarter of what we’ve seen as well, I think quarter three and into quarter four in 2023, we had some headwinds, anyone buying anywhere, interest rates, inflation, cost of living. So I think that did impact the market and I think people were waiting, particularly if they wanted to get a mortgage, I think people were waiting until the start of the new year when they were expecting interest rates to start to come down, which it looks like they’re going to. So I think this is all very normal, and I think, like you say, I think what we’ve seen is just a balancing back to some sort of normality, but still the figures are very, very healthy on a long-term basis. So that’s all good.

– Yeah, this looks like it’s a kind of textbook soft landing. It’s a mini boom, which came in the wake of the pandemic and was in many ways triggered by the pandemic. It wasn’t just pent up demand from the lockdown period. There was more to the story than that, but just as this figure shows, as this chart shows, November in 2019 was 13%. November last year sales was 13% above the same figure in 2019, which was like a normal year before the pandemic, when the market was kind of going along fine and there was no prices in the air. So that just puts into perspective, although it’s a decline compared to last year, it’s still a very good year in terms of sales at a national level.

– Yeah, very good.

– Andalusia & Malaga, it’s the same story, but you can see it’s worth having a look anyway. Andalusia November sales were 10,908 and year on year they were 8.6% down. So a bit higher, a bit more than the national average. Once again, the big spike after lockdown, and as the market opened up quite a most of it, another year of growth. And then this year showing negative, but only compared to the last year. And Malaga hear more growth. I mean, sales this year were down 15% on last year in November, but probably because sales were so strong last year.

– I think it’s interesting as well that I’m guessing these figures don’t take into account completions of off-plan properties that were, yeah.

– No. These are only set of completed sales.

– Yeah, and I think we’ve seen a lot of that in the second half of last year in Andalusia & Malaga province. I think we’ve seen a lot of off-plan sales because there’s been a lack of resale stock. So I think if you were to include the off plan sales in this, I don’t think those figures would be, well, they might be halved, so they wouldn’t be, they wouldn’t look as shocking, but I think that’s where a lot of the money has gone.

– Yes, absolutely makes sense. It is always the incognito, I’m working on that and another project, how to get more visibility into off-plan sales. But actually, if you look at… I was looking at ’em yesterday, the figures for housing starts planning approvals and they’ve been very strong down your way. So there’s a lot that’s not shown up in some areas, like in the Balearic, where there’s no building or very little building, and you wouldn’t expect off-plan sales to be that are not being counted in this reporting period. You wouldn’t expect ’em to make a big difference, but down in the Marbella Estepona, that stretch of the cost could make a big difference, like you say, could have this decline.

– Well, it’s interesting ’cause you know, we’re having to wait at the moment. We had a client this morning who wanted to go and see a new development in Estepona, and we can’t get an appointment at the development until Wednesday next week, and we’re recording this on a Friday, so there’s a four-five day wait there. So I think it shows the interest, obviously, that might not translate into sales, but it normally is pretty indicative of demand.

– Well, yeah, that developer’s probably feeling good when you’ve got that kind of a backlog of visits to handle.

– That developer needs to hire more staff, I think.

– Absolutely. Okay, so once again, this is now indexing again to back to 2007 Andalusia, you can see so 100 back in 2007 and today. Well, so these are ready for 2022. I will have 22 in a month’s time. We’ll be able to see what it was like for 2023, but it’s kind of just gone continued around here. Andalusia was 83 compared to a hundred sales, so still, what is that? It’s like 17% below its level of sales in 2007, Spain is at 85, Madrid and Catalonia are already back to a hundred because this prices were inflation matters, here inflation doesn’t have any thing to say. This is just like activity.

– It’s really interesting, isn’t it, that you look at that very gradual increase from 2013 to 2018, 2019 before Covid struck. That was a nice sort of gentle increase in sales, wasn’t it?

– It was, yeah.

– Not boom or bust, it’s only things like Covid or the recession, obviously the great recession that has caused the big dips and peaks and troughs.

– Yeah, and 2013 really was the year that the market bottomed out after declining from about 2007 to 2013 was all decline. And then it started, it varied by, you know, this is Andalusia, it’s a different graph. I mean they all follow more the same, but Catalonia has a different picture because of things like, there was this Catalan independence process in 2017 to them, which changed the story a little bit. But that’s essentially what happened since 2013. We’ve been 10 years of what would’ve been relatively steady recovery, still not recovering to the peaks of the boom, but steady recovery until Covid hit. Anyway, there and without Covid, I’m not sure we’d be far away from where we are now, but there just wouldn’t have been this dip here. It was just, I agree, carry on like that. So that’s in terms of sales where we are compared to using an index of 2007 and latest periods combined once again. And I think this is the last slide or the second last slide. This is comparing the regions again, so here you can see Andalusia here, is the biggest region in terms of sales. This is Q3 last year and so what I have here is the blue is all sales and the dark blue is foreign sales. So this is the biggest market, but Valencia is the biggest market in terms of foreign sales. And going down, I mean the Balearic’s and the Canaries, they’re very small markets in comparison. And then this chart below shows the year on year change. And here you have once again, light blue is all sales and dark blue is foreign sales. So you can see there was the biggest decline in both all and foreign sales took place in the Balearics last in that quarter down almost 30% in terms of foreign bond followed by the Canary. So the islands didn’t have a great interesting quarter. Catalonia, Madrid, Andalusia kind of doing relatively well compared to other regions in terms of year on year change in both total sales and foreign sales. Valencian C. actually been doing kind of well better than most throughout the last two years.

– And I think that’s probably because they cater to a more massive market audience, so as prices have gone a little bit crazy in other areas of Spain than the ones that look like they represent value have become popular again.

– Yeah, it’s funny that all those years later, the Murcia, I include it in the regions I cover just because it’s got this very high percentage of the market is foreign and it’s mainly British and it’s all thanks to Polaris world.

– You’re right, you’re right.

– They created that market before going past.

– In fairness they did, and they created something quite exceptional, really. And it would’ve been very interesting to see if they had developed all their resorts. The idea with Polaris World was that they were going to develop seven or eight resorts, and you as an owner on one, you could play golf on another and enjoy the facilities and blah, blah, blah. And they kind of got halfway there before the recession came and they went bust. But they’ve still, their legacy is that they’ve created some very special places, which now when you compare what there aren’t similar products really elsewhere, but, so they look like good value again, for what you get, whether you’d want to live there as opposed to somewhere like Costa del Sol or the Canaries, or the Balearics is another matter. But in terms of property stock and the relatable value, I think it stacks up.

– Yep, absolutely. Any final thoughts on the date we looked at?

– I mean obviously we’re only exposed to the Costa del Sol which is pretty much from Malaga down towards Sotogrande and Gibraltar. And we did some stats of our our own internal sales figures. And our average sale is up, our average, everything is up basically, and we had 17 nationalities buying with us last year. The UK was the dominant nationality. I think that’s fair for us because our website is not translated into any of the language apart from English. The second most dominant market for us was Americans, third most dominant were Irish, and then Belgium and Spain in equal fourth. And then you have Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Netherlands, France, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, the UK the U.S. and Ireland were our dominant market. I know there was a lot of activity in Benelux and Scandinavian markets. We just don’t specialise in those markets, although we did sell to those nationalities as well. And I think what we had last year was we had this ending of the post Covid boom, which I said would happen, that we would’ve satisfied the demand of those people who wanted a change of life after Covid. But what we’ve also had certainly down here is we’ve had this branding of Marbella and its surrounding areas as the California of Europe, which has attracted a lot of interest from not only the Americans, because they can identify with that very readily, but also from a number of people who that spillover from Covid really has made them realise that, oh, they can be trusted to work from home, or if they’re business owners, they can commute, so it’s introduced a different type of buyer to this area that’s put pressure on, obviously the demand has increased particularly in the areas where everybody wants to be. But also apart from those factors, we’ve also had the headwinds that I mentioned earlier in terms of the cost of living crisis, inflation going up, interest rates going up. So anyone looking at finance, it’s becoming more expensive. I’ve noticed with my mortgage it’s just gone. So, that has put people off. And I think that’s why the market slowed in certainly in quarter four. I think we could start feeling at quarter three. So we had two distinct tasks for the year, which again is something I predicted that we would see. But what’s encouraging obviously is that those market fundamentals seem to be improving as we head into 2024. And we’ve seen our record January so far, I mean, we’re not even at the end of it, and we’ve already recorded the most sales at the highest values that we’ve ever recorded in 23 years. So we thought this year would be nice steady, like last year was our busiest year ever, but we just thought that it’ll be a continuation and a nice kind of flat-lining. But actually so far this month, we’re off and running big time.

– Well I mean, that’s great. Maybe that’s just you, maybe you are getting a bigger bite out of a shrinking market who knows. We’ll have to wait and see what the January data shows. And in fact, I think maybe next month we could talk about, I should have a better idea of international demand for property down in your, well all over Spain, but down in your neck of the woods. I’ve got already for, what the latest I’ve got, it’s only 2022. So yeah, we’ll get some good figures for 2023 on the breakdown. We know that in Andalusia, number one in 2022, was the British followed by the Swedes, the Dutch, and then the Belgians Germans, French. No mention of the Americans, but you know, we can have another chat about what different nationalities are buying, why they’re buying but just to wrap up, so your forecast for this year and you would like put your neck out.

– Yeah, you know what?

– Stick your neck out.

– I’ve stopped judging the business on a month to month basis, ’cause you just can’t, and particularly the levels that we’re working at in terms of the average sale price now being pretty much a million euros, that’s a lot of money for people to spend. So I don’t think you can judge it month by month. I think quarter by quarter is the best way for us to do that. I think we’re going to end up with a similar year to last year in terms of volume and activity. I think that, like you said, we’ve probably had more than our share of certain markets. The Americans probably, particularly because of the way we market stuff over there. I think there’s going to be some pain in the agent market because a lot of new agents entered the fray off the back of the little Covid boom that we had thinking, “Wow! this is great, let’s make some money.” And I think what’s happened is now that the market has just cooled down a little bit and it’s a normalised market. I think some of those agents who aren’t equipped to grab some market share are going to struggle. So there might look to be a little bit of pain in the market, but that’s probably going to be from the agents more than the buyers and the sellers. I think there’s probably too many agents to satisfy the demand. And the ones, as I say, the ones that aren’t equipped to do well are going to fall by the wayside, I think. And people might hear about that and think that’s what’s happening in the market. No, no, no, it’s just the agents are going to suffer a little bit, not that people will care, but I think that’s what might happen.

– Bit of thinning out.

– That’s it. That’s the word thinning, yes.

– Well, listen, let’s see. I think on paper, which is where I am, you know, on the ground, and I’m looking at the reports and creating the reports. The signs of promising, so inflation’s down and interest rates, Europe bonds heading down, there’s expectations of interest rate cuts coming later on this year and the Spanish general election is behind it. A lot of things that were unsettling or destabilising last year are moving in the right direction.

– They are.

– Given how well this market performed last year, let’s see what happens this year, but it’s not looking bad on paper right now.

– No, it doesn’t take a lot as, you know, it doesn’t take a lot for that to be knocked a little bit. If there’s a war somewhere and there’s a few things brewing aren’t there. That which is a bit nasty, but you know what the biggest thing is, as long as the sun continues to shine here, Mark, people will want to live here and holiday here, and that’s the biggest driver of the market.

– Yeah, absolutely. The quality of life and the weather and the—

– Absolutely. That’s the important thing. Thank you so much for your help and your contribution and your work on those slides and that presentation. That’s invaluable. I’m sure we’ll get some good feedback from our viewers and listeners, so thank you again. And until next time I shall get you farewell, sir.

– Lovely to talk to you Sean, take care.

– Take care, cheers for now, bye-bye.