BBVA Research has torn up its own housing forecast for Spain: prices are now expected to rise 12% in 2026, while sales fall 7.3%. In March the same bank was predicting +10.2% and a dip of just 1.6%. The revision, presented on 10 August, is the story — and the driver is not fading demand. Spain simply cannot build homes fast enough, for reasons that now include, of all things, the electricity grid.
What BBVA actually forecasts
The numbers come from the bank's own July 2026 report, España: perspectivas y electricidad en el sector inmobiliario, presented on 10 August:
| Indicator | 2026 | 2027 |
|---|---|---|
| Home prices | +12.0% | +5.7% |
| Home sales | −7.3% | +0.6% |
| Building permits | +10.1% | +12.6% |
| Housing starts | 153,000 | 170,000 |
| New households formed | 223,000 | 217,000 |
The last two rows carry the whole argument. In a year when 223,000 new households appear, Spain will start construction on 153,000 homes. Keep that up and the accumulated shortfall reaches roughly 885,000 homes by 2027 — BBVA's own estimate. Construction is not stalling; permits are growing by double digits. It is simply running far behind the pace that demand sets.
One thing the bank says that headline writers skip, and that we will not: BBVA expects the pressure to ease, not escalate. Price growth halves to 5.7% in 2027 and sales tick back into positive territory. This is a bottleneck being slowly worked through — not a spiral.
The constraint nobody was talking about: electricity
The most original finding of this edition barely made the news. According to BBVA, 88% of Spain's electricity distribution nodes have less than one megawatt of spare capacity — and adding grid capacity takes five to eight years.
For a developer that is not an inconvenience; it is a wall. A residential project that needs a new grid connection can hold every permit on paper and still spend years waiting for power. It is a structural explanation for why a 10.1% rise in permits does not become homes at anything like the same speed. BBVA gives the state housing plan for 2026–2030 credit for its budget and its permanent social-housing commitment — and then concludes, flatly, that it is not enough against a deficit this size.
Why we would not rest the argument on transaction counts
"Sales fell X%" is the weakest number in this whole picture, for two reasons that rarely reach the headline.
First, the series everyone quotes is built from the Property Registers. A deed reaches the registry weeks or months after it was signed at the notary, so the count records when a purchase was registered, not when it was made. The notaries publish their own near-real-time figures, and the two sources routinely disagree — most of all at turning points, precisely when everyone stares at the data.
Second, the underlying statistic counts transfers of rights of every kind — purchases, inheritances, donations, swaps — across homes, plots and other urban property. The breakdown is published, but the totals get quoted loosely, and a figure that includes an inherited flat inland says nothing about buyer demand on the coast.
None of that makes the data worthless. It makes it a lagging, mixed indicator that cannot carry an argument alone. The numbers that can: housing starts against household formation, land costs, and who is actually buying.
The Costa Blanca version of the same story
With that caveat on the table: Alicante province logged 25,085 home sales in the first half of 2026, down 7.6% year on year. The internal split is the readable part — new-build sales fell roughly twice as fast as resale, −12.4% against −6.4%. If that were a demand signal, it would be worrying. It is not one: foreign buyers still account for 44.65% of all purchases in the province, the highest share in Spain. What has thinned is the stock, and new build thinned first.
The figure underneath all of it is the one to remember. Urban land in Alicante province costs 30.1% more than a year ago (Ineca). Land is not a lagging count of past deals — it is the entry price of every home not yet built, and it dictates what the next wave of projects must charge. For context, the average asking price for finished homes in the province rose a far more modest 3.33% in the year to June, to €2,233/m².
Financing is no longer the variable that will save you
For three years the default plan was "wait for cheaper money". That plan has expired. The 12-month Euribor closed July at 2.855%, up from 2.798% in June — the second month of drift upwards. The ECB held its rate at 2.25% on 23 July and does not meet in August, so nothing moves before autumn. Waiting no longer buys anything on the financing side.
Our mortgage guide for foreign buyers covers what Spanish banks currently lend to non-residents and on what terms.
Where we would push back on the headline — and where we would not
The 12% is a forecast, and a national average at that. It is not a statement about any individual apartment, and anyone who quotes it as if it were is selling you something. Alicante's own recorded pace — that 3.33% on asking prices — is a different measurement on a different scale, and the two must not be added together or swapped for one another.
That caution matters most for a finished resale flat you buy and hold. It matters far less in the scenario most buyers on this coast are actually weighing.
Why an off-plan purchase follows a different curve
Buy at construction stage today, and the number that will define your home's value at handover is not this year's price index. It is what an identical new apartment costs to build and sell at that moment — the replacement cost.
That cost is moving already, and faster than finished-home prices: land up 30.1% in a year, build costs not standing still. A developer who launches the same building in 2028 starts from a materially higher base and must price accordingly — and when that project reaches the market at a higher price per square metre, it becomes the benchmark against which everything recently delivered next door is valued.
Buyers on the Costa Blanca have watched this mechanism play out repeatedly: a home bought off-plan two years ago now sits among newer launches asking visibly more, and it reprices upward without a single thing about the apartment changing.
The honest boundary: this is a mechanism, not a guarantee. It holds while demand holds, and while the developer actually delivers on time and to specification — which is why a track record of completed phases is worth more than a discount in the price list. Rising land and build costs raise the floor for the next generation of homes; they do not underwrite any particular resale price. And if your plan is to flip in a year or two, this data does not support that bet — the round-trip costs of buying and selling in Spain run to 10–13% on their own.
What this means if you are buying
1. The constraint has moved from money to inventory
The question is no longer "will my mortgage be cheaper in six months" — right now the answer is no. The question is what is still available at current phase prices.
2. Today's projects were costed on yesterday's land
Developments selling now were budgeted before the last jump in land values. Those launching in 2027–2028 will not be. That gap is the practical case for working through what is on the market today rather than waiting for projects that have not been announced.
3. Staged payments matter more when rates are flat
Most new developments on this coast are paid in stages through construction, with the balance at handover. With rates stable rather than falling, a staged plan fixes today's price while letting you arrange financing closer to completion — instead of borrowing at today's rates for a home you receive in 2028.
4. Fewer sales does not mean more room to haggle
A falling transaction count looks like a buyer's market on paper. On this coast it mostly measures how little there is left to buy at accessible prices. Discounts exist — on individual properties that were mispriced or have sat too long, not across the market.
The takeaway
Spain in 2026 is not a cooling market. It is a thinning one: the same demand chasing a shrinking pool of homes, financing that has stopped improving, and land costs that put the next wave of new builds on a higher base.
For a buyer on the Costa Blanca, the useful conclusion from BBVA's revision is not the 12% headline. It is that the two forces that set the price of a new home — the land beneath it and the number of alternatives around it — are moving in the same direction, and neither reverses in a season. The decision worth making now is which of the available projects fits you, not whether to wait for a correction that the supply data does not support.
Our overview of the Spanish property market in 2026 tracks the longer trend region by region, and the new-build catalogue is kept current with phase prices and availability.
