The numbers
Reading a price per square metre
The most quoted number in property and the least useful at the top of it. What it measures, what it hides, and how the Ranesta Index uses it anyway.
Costa del Sol · Spain
Marbella
The most liquid villa market in southern Europe, with more sun than anywhere else on the continent and a transfer tax that is half of the Balearic rate. It rewards buyers who know the difference between a gated estate and a good address.
The Ranesta Index
€8,000 to 16,000
Prime band, per m²
€25,000
Trophy, per m²
3.5 to 5.0%
Gross yield
50%
Sold off-market
8.7%
Cost to acquire
0.8%
Cost to hold, a year
Editorial estimate of prime asking bands, September 2026. Not a valuation. Typical entry €3.0 m, trophy from €25 m. Prime marketing time about 180 days.
Where exactly
Golden Mile and Sierra Blanca
The classic addresses between the town and Puerto Banús, beachside on one side of the road and on the hill on the other. Beachside plots on the Mile are the trophy: twenty thousand a square metre and rising with every rebuild.
La Zagaleta and El Madroñal
The gated estates in the hills behind Benahavís: two golf courses, a heliport, twenty-four-hour security and plots of a hectare. Zagaleta is its own market with its own committee and its own resale rules.
Nueva Andalucía and the Golf Valley
Villas around the courses, the most active band between two and six million, and the place to buy for a family that plays and lets. Prices move fastest here in both directions.
Sotogrande
Forty minutes west, quieter, more Spanish, with the polo and a marina. Larger plots, lower entry, and a market that behaves like a private club rather than a resort.
The short version
A market with liquidity
Marbella trades. Where Mallorca has scarcity and Ibiza has a season, Marbella has volume: several thousand prime transactions a year, a permanent population of agents, developers and lawyers, and a buyer base wide enough that a well-priced villa finds its buyer in six months. That liquidity is the asset. It is also the reason the market has more noise than any other on this list.
The noise is in the new-build. A generation of speculative villas has been built in the hills with the same rendering, the same infinity pool and the same six-thousand-square-metre ambition, and many of them will be resold within five years by owners who found the drive to the beach longer than the photograph suggested. The desk prices location first and finish last.
The addresses that hold are the old ones: the beachside Golden Mile, Sierra Blanca, the established streets of Nueva Andalucía, and the two gated estates. Everything else is a view of a golf course and a bet on the next buyer.
Worth knowing
Transfer tax on a resale
Flat 7 per cent in Andalusia, the lowest of the Spanish coasts
New build instead
10 per cent VAT plus 1.2 per cent stamp duty
Wealth tax
Andalusia has abolished its own; the national solidarity tax still applies above three million of net Spanish assets
Holiday letting
Registration-based and workable for villas; community rules increasingly restrict apartments
New-build share
The highest of any prime market in Spain; a third of what sells above three million is under five years old
Season
Twelve months, which is why the letting yield is the best on the mainland
Who is buying
Northern Europeans above all, then buyers from the Gulf, a growing share of Americans since the flights from New York, and Spanish money from Madrid. The letting investor and the family buyer are the same person here.
What the desk is working on
Beachside on the Golden Mile at any price, resale villas in Zagaleta below the developer level, and plots in Sierra Blanca with a licence. The desk also carries two seller instructions for houses that must not appear on a portal for family reasons.
Buying notes
Costs are the lowest in Spain at just under nine per cent all in on a resale. The ten per cent deposit is binding on both sides. Non-EU buyers need an NIE; the investor visa is gone. Check the community statutes on letting before anything else, because the rules have tightened building by building.
In the private portfolio
RN-0421 · Marbella
Beachside on the Golden Mile
A contemporary house on the sea side of the road, a short walk from the town, with a garden to the beach path.
7 bedrooms1,100 m²2,600 m² plot
€14 m to 17 mReference RN-0421
RN-0402 · Marbella
Estate inside La Zagaleta
A hectare on the upper road of the estate with a house of the first generation, priced for a rebuild.
8 bedrooms1,900 m²10,000 m² plot
€12 m to 15 mReference RN-0402
The hotspot vote
Marbella for you means
Questions buyers ask
Different products. Zagaleta sells security, land and privacy to people who will not walk to a restaurant. The Golden Mile sells the walk. Buyers who want both usually end up with two houses.
The best of them, in the best positions, yes. The rest are priced for the first buyer and will be resold at a discount by the second. The instrument that matters is the drive time to the beach at eight in the evening in August.
A well-run villa in Nueva Andalucía lets for thirty to thirty-five weeks and returns four to five per cent gross before management. Beachside houses on the Mile are bought for use and yield less. Run the numbers in the instrument before you believe a brochure.
Faster than anywhere on the Spanish coast. A resale villa priced at the market moves in three to six months; a rebuild in a good position can go in weeks, usually off-market.
Read next
The numbers
The places
The hotspot cycle
Prime markets do not move together. Dubai has fallen forty per cent twice; the Gold Coast of Zürich has not fallen in living memory. How the cycle works at the top, and how to buy through it.
The Private Letter
One letter a month.
One letter a month: what moved in the hotspots, one anonymised sale explained, one number worth knowing. No advertising, no tracking, one click to leave.