Sale Prices Are Live, Plus a Rent Map and 12 Years of History

We've been quiet for a few months. This is what we were working on.

You can see purchase prices now

Until now this site only told you what it costs to rent here. Now it shows what it costs to buy, too.

Every neighbourhood and district page shows the average sale price per m² next to the rent, both from official Generalitat data on registered transactions. Sarrià is the most expensive place to buy in the city at €7,873/m². la Trinitat Vella is the cheapest at €2,255/m². That's a 3.5× spread within one city.

The number that needs both

Once you have rent and purchase price for the same neighbourhood, you can work out the gross rental yield: a year's rent as a share of what the flat costs.

The range is wider than most people expect:

• la Trinitat Vella: 8.30%. About 12 years of rent to equal the purchase price.
• Sarrià: 2.97%. About 34 years.

This number gets misread a lot, so one warning. A high yield means cheap to buy. It doesn't mean better. la Trinitat Vella tops the list because nobody is bidding up the flats. And "gross" means before IBI, community fees, insurance, maintenance, empty months and tax. Realistically, take one to two points off.

A map of the whole city

The homepage now opens with a map of Barcelona's ten districts, shaded by price. Switch the toggle from rent to buy and the map recolours.

Try it once, because it shows something a table doesn't. Ciutat Vella is the second most expensive district to rent in Barcelona, but only the seventh most expensive to buy. The Gothic Quarter is priced for tourists rather than for owners.

More history than we had

Neighbourhood rent data now runs quarterly from 2014, and district-level rent goes back to 2000, which is 105 quarters. Sale prices go back to 2013. Every district page has a trend chart covering all of it.

For context, Ciutat Vella rented for €5.00/m² in early 2000. Today it's €18.41/m².

A bug in our own data

While building this we found a bug in our own import script. It had been reading a cumulative column from the source spreadsheet as if it were quarterly data, and mixing district totals in with the neighbourhoods. Some figures on this site were wrong.

We rebuilt the whole series from source and added checks that fail loudly instead of quietly. If a number looks different from what you remember, that's why. The new one is correct.

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All figures come from the Generalitat de Catalunya: INCASÒL for rent, registered transaction statistics for sale prices. Compare your own rent or browse the districts.