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Construction of new homes in Malaga province is picking up significantly. The architects’ association (Colegio de Arquitectos de Málaga) recently released the official figures on how many new home construction projects were approved during 2024, a requirement for all property building plans.
The figures show a total of 8,902 new homes planned for Malaga city and the rest of the province, up 27.5% on the total for 2023. The number of approvals is the highest in the last six years and represents an upward trend compared to the results of the last two years when approvals across the province stagnated at around 7,000 homes.
In 2024 it was not only Malaga city getting the nod (2,246 homes approved), but also towns on the Costa del Sol, especially Estepona (1,503 units), more than double that of Marbella (620 signed off). Another noteworthy example is Mijas with 732 homes planned.
Joining them are Torremolinos, Fuengirola and Benahavís, all of which had around 300 approvals apiece over the past year. On the east coast, Vélez-Málaga registered plans for 385 approved dwellings.
In terms of types of property, 811 projects involving 1,621 detached properties were approved. Marbella was the town with the most of these plans, with 82.
Apartment blocks accounted for 259 projects with a total of 6,590 homes. The two municipalities with the most plans on the table last year were Malaga and Estepona.
The architects’ association also released the figures of completed properties in 2024. Here, there was also a significant increase: some 6,853 new homes were signed off by the association, 41 per cent more that in 2023.
Of them 1,380 were single family homes, in 553 projects. Malaga and Mijas were the municipalities with the most houses completed, 254 and 172 respectively. Some 140 houses were completed in Marbella, although the total value of these properties was higher than in Malaga and Mijas.
Meanwhile 5,447 new apartments were completed in 2024 in Malaga province, in 199 projects. Malaga was the municipality with the most of these new flats (1,259) followed by Estepona with 1,051.
Susana Gómez de Lara, the head of the association, said that the figures confirmed a “growing trend in the promotion of homes of high value, due to the demand from investors with a higher purchasing power”.She added, though, that the higher numbers of high-end properties compared with the lower affordable housing figures was contributing to the difficulty in finding a home on the Costa del Sol for many.
In terms of subsidised housing, projects for 691 flats were approved in 2024, all located in Malaga city. However, these are developments that have been planned in different urban areas for more than a decade and are now being reactivated. Such is the case with the 530 rented VPOs (Vivienda de Protección Oficial - subsidised housing) planned to the west of the university campus in Malaga city and which have finally been taken over by the Swedish capital investment group Lagoom Living following a land tender handed out by the city council.
Susana Gómez de Lara insisted on the importance of supporting and pushing for subsidised housing to alleviate the problem of access to housing in Malaga so that “[the problem] does not become a permanent fixture, although it almost is”.
“Access to affordable housing continues to be a challenge, and it is essential to move towards a system that allows the public housing stock to be expanded,” said Gómez de Lara, who described it as “crucial” that public administrations promote “effective measures that facilitate the construction of this type of housing.” She added that such measures must be “transversal and diverse, and proposed for both short and long terms.”
Equally, she views as positive the announcements made in late January by PM Sánchez’s government and Malaga’s mayor Francisco de la Torre that spoke of plans to boost housing construction at national and local levels.
“We see that these measures are aimed at obtaining more land and speeding up urban planning procedures,” she said. She then voiced her support of the mayor’s announcement to revise the city’s PGOU (urban development plan) “not only to designate more land for future construction, but also to plan new infrastructure”.
However, she remains committed to developing sectors that have yet to be urbanised in the short term.
This leading figure among Malaga’s architects then referred to the agreement that is underway between the planning department at city hall and her association to collaborate over a review of building permit cases. She mentioned that working groups are already being held to train and coordinate both association members and staff in town planning, and work is being done on a computer system that will allow all of them access to the specific urban planning regulations that affect the different plots of land.
“The idea is that by the middle of the year we will be able to start collaborating with city hall in reviewing files, which we believe will help to speed up the building permits.”
To this end they have already had a meeting with the relevant experts in the regional ministry of culture and will soon be meeting the same from the regional environment ministry specifically to ask them to speed up their mandatory reports too.
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