Blog · Market data

Reading the Alicante line in the registrars' foreign-buyer table

§ 1The sentence everyone repeats

Every few months a newspaper or an agent tells you that foreigners now buy nearly half of the homes in Alicante province. The figure is real. It sits in the quarterly report of the property registrars, and for the second quarter of 2026 it reads 46.43%. The report also gives 31.03% for the Valencian Community as a whole, and 15.98% for Spain, which the registrars describe as the highest in their series.

We like that report because it is dull in the right way: it is built from registered purchases, not from asking prices or surveys. But a sentence can be accurate and still mislead. So this note opens the table, checks what the figure counts, does a few sums the report does not do for you, and ends with a way to quote it without fooling anybody. For the wider picture, the overview of the foreign-buyer figures is the better starting point. This note is the deep dive on one line.

§ 2What the line counts

The unit is a registered home purchase: a sale that reached the property registry in the quarter, new or second-hand. It is not a sale signed that quarter, and it is not a mortgage. Because registration usually comes some time after signing, the quarter's figure describes deals that were largely signed earlier. If you are trying to tell what the market is doing this month, you are looking at a lagging mirror.

The report also says who counts as foreign. The classification is by nationality. That sounds technical, but it matters. A Dutch couple who moved to Alicante ten years ago and now buy a bigger flat are Dutch buyers in this table. So are a retired Briton buying a holiday home from Manchester and a Polish worker buying her first flat near her job. The report does not tell them apart.

For you, that means the share is a measure of who buys, not of who is overseas. If you want to know how many buyers are non-residents, this table cannot answer. The central bank gives a figure for gross purchases by non-residents, and the chapter on which statistics to trust explains why the two numbers should never be mixed up.

§ 3The table has totals, and the share lives in the text

Here is something we only noticed when we went looking for the number of foreign buyers in Alicante: there is no such number. The provincial table lists the total purchases registered, split into new and used. In the second quarter it shows 12,298 for Alicante, 9,619 for Valencia and 3,220 for Castellón. The foreign shares appear only in the text, in a ranking, and the report does not give them for Valencia or Castellón provinces at all.

That is why you will see articles with a confident count of foreign buyers in Alicante. It is arithmetic, and it is worth doing yourself so that you know what it rests on. The sums below are ours, not the registrars'.

§ 4Doing the sums

Take the Alicante total and multiply by the share. 12,298 purchases at 46.43% comes to roughly 5,700 purchases by foreigners in the quarter. Now do the same for the region: the Valencian Community total of 25,137 at 31.03% comes to roughly 7,800.

Two things stand out. First, roughly seven in ten of the foreign purchases in the whole region happen in Alicante province. The regional share looks like a figure for a "Valencian" market, but it is mostly a figure about one province. Second, once Alicante is taken out, the rest of the region, which is Valencia and Castellón together, comes to a foreign share of about one in six. That is close to the national figure and nothing like the headline.

These sums use rounded shares and assume the province and region percentages are measured the same way. They are good enough for a feel, not for a footnote. If you publish a number built this way, say that you derived it.

§ 5The nationality trap

The report also ranks the nationalities of foreign buyers, and that is where most of the careless quoting happens. British buyers account for 6.99% of foreign purchases, Dutch for 6.94%, German for 6.11% and French for 4.97%. These are shares of foreign buyers across the whole of Spain. They are not shares of foreign buyers in Alicante, and the text we read gives no ranking by province.

It is tempting to assume that Alicante's foreigners look like Spain's foreigners. They may not. The coast is known for northern European buyers, but you cannot read that from this table. When a source needs nationality for a town, look for one that publishes it for that town, and check how it counts.

If nationality is what you are after, the overview of which nationalities buy in Spain explains what the national ranking can and cannot support.

§ 6A small slip in the report

While we were checking the report we noticed a labelling inconsistency. The summary at the front compares the foreign share with the fourth quarter of 2025, and the detailed section compares it with the first quarter of 2026. The change quoted matches the second label, and the first quarter is the one that comes right before the second, so we assume the first label is a typing slip. It did not affect any figure we use here, and the report does not flag it.

We mention it for two reasons. It shows that even an official, careful report has small errors, which is a reason to quote the figure and the quarter together. And it is the kind of detail that only turns up when someone reads the whole document and not the press summary.

§ 7What the figure does not tell you about a village

Suppose you are looking at a house in a small town inland from the coast. The province-wide share says almost nothing about that town. A province is a big and uneven place. Registered purchases in a quarter are dominated by the coastal towns and the new-build developments, where foreign demand is concentrated, not by the villages behind them.

So use the figure for what it is good for: a sign that the province has a deep market of foreign buyers, which affects the supply of English-speaking lawyers, the ease of reselling to another foreigner and the number of agents who work in your language. Do not use it as proof that your street will be full of neighbours from abroad, or that prices will behave the way they did last year. For a particular town, the chapters on buying a flat in Alicante and on the Costa Blanca as a whole list the checks that matter more than any province share.

If you are weighing the area against the next one up the coast, the pages on buying in Valencia city and buying in Castellón will show you how different the rest of the region is.

§ 8Checking the report yourself

You do not need a statistics degree to repeat this exercise. Open the quarterly report on the registrars' site and find the provincial table of purchases. Write down the total for the province you care about. Then find the sentence in the text that gives the foreign share for that province, and note that it may be missing for smaller provinces, as it is here for two of the three.

Next, multiply, and round the answer. Be honest in your notes about which numbers came from the report and which are yours. When the next quarter arrives, repeat the sums and compare the shares, not the counts, because the totals move with the season. A summer quarter and a winter quarter are different animals, and a drop in the count can sit alongside a rise in the share.

Finally, keep the first edition you read. Reports can be revised or republished, and the page that says one thing in October may say another in January. A saved copy with the date on it is the best defence when a seller or an agent quotes you a figure from memory.

§ 9How to quote it

If you must use the headline, here is a sentence that will survive a sceptical reader. "In the second quarter of 2026, buyers of foreign nationality accounted for 46.43% of the home purchases registered in Alicante province, according to the property registrars." It names the quarter, the unit, the meaning of foreign and the source. It does not say that half of Alicante is foreign, that these buyers live abroad or that they are British.

A last tip for your own reading: when you see a percentage next to a province, look for the total it came from. A share of 167,934 registered purchases nationwide is a different thing from a share of one province's total, and the second moves much more when a few dozen sales change hands.

Dotted underline marks an illustrative figure. It shows how a calculation works and is not a quote, a rate or a forecast.

General information only. This is not legal, tax or financial advice. Check your own situation with a qualified adviser.