The average age of people who buy a home in the Canary Islands or in the Balearic Islands is the highest in Spain and is around 50 years old, driven by high prices and the weight of international or second-home buyers, according to the General Council of Technical Architecture of Spain (CGATE).
A report from this entity shows that the purchase of housing is delayed three months for each percentage point that the price rises, so that the average age of acquisition is already at 41.8 years.
Taking as reference the data from notaries and registrars, the Council explains that the acquisition of the first home has shifted almost a decade since the year 2000 and in some communities it is already approaching 50 years of age.
Each 1% increase in housing prices causes an approximate delay of 0.24 years -almost three months- in the age of access to property, a phenomenon defined as generational delay coefficient.
If at the beginning of the 2000s, access to the first home usually occurred between 31 and 33 years old, today that moment is delayed until 38-41 years old.
The study also explains that access to housing is conditioned by territorial differences, configuring what experts call "the geography of delay", in which the most strained markets push the age of purchase towards much more advanced stages of life.
In this regard, the autonomous communities of Murcia, Castilla-La Mancha or Extremadura register average purchase ages close to 45 years. At the opposite extreme are the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands, where the average age of buyers approaches 50 years.
Communities with strong real estate pressure like Madrid and Catalonia are situated around 47 years on average.
Territorial differences do not respond as much to the evolution of wages as to the behavior of the real estate market, where the price of land, tourist pressure or the presence of buyers with greater investment capacity, normally international investment funds, decisively influence the moment in which residents can buy a house.
