Real Estate price transparency

The Bank of Spain and the Ministry of Housing have recently signed a cooperation agreement to improve the analysis of the housing market in Spain. This agreement aims to strengthen the quality of the information available, foster collaboration between both institutions, and advance toward a deeper and more structured understanding of the real estate and housing sector. Among its objectives are the creation of a shared data space and the joint development of analytical projects.

Reinforcing this move toward greater market insight, the Bank of Spain has also entered into a new agreement with the General Council of Notaries. This collaboration is designed to further strengthen real estate market analysis by leveraging the precise and detailed data generated through notarial activities, complementing the broader push for enhanced data quality and research.

At Accumin, we see this development as an opportunity to improve transparency and build trust across the entire residential ecosystem; including a genuine conversation we believe is essential: the need to improve transparency around actual sale prices as a lever for a less opaque and a more precise and trustworthy sector.

There are useful examples across Europe. In the United Kingdom, actual sale prices are openly accessible to all market participants. In Germany, although the real sales prices data is not public, there are systems in place so that appraisal firms and banks have access to real data allowing them to improve the quality and consistency of their valuations and risk assessments. Both models show that there are viable ways to make better use of available information and raise industry standards.

Improving transparency benefits all stakeholders in the residential ecosystem: citizens and consumers, who can make better-informed decisions; financial institutions, which can manage risk more effectively; and supervisory authorities, which gain more reliable tools to assess market conditions.

The recent announcement from the Bank of Spain and the Ministry of Housing opens the door to further progress in this direction. Not only from an institutional standpoint, but as part of a broader cultural and technical shift already underway.