The third bedroom is temporarily used as a storage room, with space for an ironing board and a bicycle. The living room is open to the compact kitchen. Table, sofa, chairs. The kitchen has light furniture and a small tap – the space for the washing machine turned out to be too small, so there are mismatched appliances. Modern and simple interiors, smooth and bright walls – an apartment like after a pinball game in Warsaw. The difference is only visible when you go out onto the terrace.
Iwona lived in fear
It is narrow but long, but most importantly, the sun shines brightly on it, even though it is already past midnight. 17. Metal tables placed diagonally on the sidewalk await the bar’s customers. A narrow street lined with three- and four-story houses, dominated by faded beige colors. It is silent, life will return to this street in three hours, at dusk.
– It’s a rather poor neighbourhood, but it’s very nice: my neighbours offer me food and invite me to family events – says Iwona. – Do you know a little about Krakow? I feel a bit like in Krakow’s Kozłówko, he jokes. However, he is wrong. In the late 1960s, construction in Kozłówko was done with prefabricated panels, and the walls of the tenement house in his apartment in Les Roquetes, although dating from the same period, were made of solid brick.
Iwona Wierzbanowska from Krakow decided to buy an apartment in Spain after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. In fact, her parents decided on this.
— My friends started to panic because there was a war abroad and maybe it would be worth investing some of our savings somewhere else, somewhere further away? – says Iwona. Besides, she lived in Barcelona, she must have her own house somewhere here anyway.
She left Krakow in 2020 for a volunteer project under the Erasmus+ programme. At first, she thought it would be a one-year trip. She landed in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation where she worked deals with youth exchanges and training on a daily basis, but during the pandemic they could only continue online. So Iwona lived in Barcelona, but worked remotely. That’s not enough to really get to know the city and the culture. After a year, she looked for another job and extended her stay. She started in the sales department of a startup that deals with yacht charters, now works part-time in a travel agency and is also starting her own private company.
I was paying 500 euros per month for a room in a flat in Barcelona, which I shared with two people, plus about 100 euros extra for electricity, water and rubbish collection. These are considerable costs for a shared flat.
— My parents could invest about 500,000 PLN. zloty. I started looking for apartments in Barcelona,” says Iwona. With the 120,000 euros her parents had at their disposal, she could only buy a dilapidated shack on the ground floor. In her search, she gradually began to move away from the city. A work colleague recommended a real estate agent to her, who showed Iwona a 60 m² apartment in Les Roquetes. I visited this apartment remotely with Iwona – two years after the purchase. It cost a total of 135,000 PLN. euros (about 580,000 PLN). When I checked the prices in Les Roquetes today, they had gone up a bit. The town is about 40 km from Barcelona, but with excellent bus and train connections. Only 2.5 km from the beach.
Iwona’s flat rates are lower than when she was renting a room in the city. They cost 30 euros (130 PLN). Electricity costs 70 euros per month, water consumption costs an additional 30 euros. Plus an alarm with monitoring – 60 euros per month.
– Everyone here installs alarms because of the threat of robberies, but also because of the fear of intruders – says Iwona. At first she lived in fear. – This is one of the poorest neighbourhoods, I was afraid of robberies. However, nothing like that has happened. I have lived here for two years, the neighbours are friendly and, above all, everyone knows each other, it is not as anonymous as in Barcelona – says Iwona. For now, he has no plans to return to Poland.
Market traffic is not decreasing
Poles invest abroad mainly to escape inflation. Apartment prices in Poland are constantly rising. According to NBP data, in the last quarter of 2023 in the seven largest cities per square meter. On average, you had to pay about PLN 12,500. PLN – by 11 percent more than a year earlier. This trend has slowed down a little this year, but not enough to exceed the maximum limit of 17,000. Average PLN per meter in Warsaw. For half a million zlotys you can buy at most a studio, while for a standard two-room apartment you need almost a million zlotys.
That is why not only the richest people, but also the Polish middle class invest in real estate abroad. Spain has been breaking popularity records in this regard for the last three years.
The basic magnet is the climate. On the popular Costa del Sol we have up to 300 days of sunshine a year. For comparison, in Poland there are only 66 of them. The problem is that this is why living in Spain is becoming increasingly difficult – there is a shortage of water, subsequent regions are introducing restrictions: first on watering gardens, then on filling swimming pools, but also on access to showers or even drinking water.
Despite this, the movement in the real estate market does not slow down. It is estimated that 650,000 houses and apartments were sold in Spain in 2022 – this is the highest rate in 15 years. It is clear that therefore apartment prices are also rising. And discrepancies between regions, for example, in Barcelona the average price per square meter is PLN 4.4 thousand. euros, in Madrid – 3.9 thousand. euros, in Malaga and Seville only a little over 2,000. euros (data for 2023)
According to data from the Spanish Land and Property Registry, in 2023, Poles bought 3,118 properties in Spain. This is 142 more than in the previous year. And 2022 was a record year – the number of properties in Spain owned by Poles almost tripled. It is easy to guess that, in addition to inflation, the outbreak of the war in Ukraine is responsible for this growing movement.
Of course, we are not the only ones – at the same time, the share of foreigners in the Spanish real estate market has increased by more than half. Buyers from Great Britain remain in first place, purchasing approximately 15,000 apartments from Spain every year. The Polish share in the Spanish real estate market was 1.6% in 2019, and by the end of 2022 it had doubled – to 3.2%. Only one in ten Polish buyers takes out a loan.
