A striking figure made the rounds this month: more than €70 million in prime property sales in the first half of 2026. It’s a genuine number — and once you know what it actually measures, it says something far bigger about Marbella than it first appears.
The Figure, In Its Own Words
The €70 million comes from a press release by Drumelia, one of Marbella’s leading prime and ultra-prime agencies, reporting its own signed-deed transaction volume for the first half of 2026 — an average ticket of €3.76 million per deal. It’s an impressive half-year for a single firm, and it was presented at the Forbes Real Estate Forum Costa del Sol alongside a thoughtful read of where the market is heading: away from post-pandemic double-digit spikes, towards what the firm’s CEO called more measured, stable and healthy growth.
Some of the coverage that followed, however, read the figure as a total for the whole Marbella prime market. SUR in English, for instance, presented the €70 million in its 18 July headline as the sum of prime property sales in Marbella for the first half of 2026, without naming the agency — while the Spanish-language outlets that carried the same release, from Andalucía Económica to El Conciso, attributed it to Drumelia in the headline itself. An easy slip in translation and sub-editing, and the body of the SUR article was otherwise a fair account of the forum. But the difference matters, because it flips the story from modest to remarkable.
The Arithmetic
€70,000,000 ÷ €3,760,000 avg. ticket = ≈ 19 transactions
Marbella municipal sales, 2025 (Notariado) ≈ 4,379
Typical half-year ≈ 2,190 transactions
€70M+
One agency’s half-year, roughly 19 prime transactions
<1%
Share of Marbella’s half-year transaction count that represents
If a single agency can write €70 million of deeds in six months while touching under one per cent of the municipality’s transactions, the depth of the market underneath is the real headline.
So How Big Is The Prime Market? Our Estimate
No official body measures a luxury tier, so any market-wide figure has to be an estimate. Here is ours, with the assumptions in the open. We define prime as transactions of €1 million and above, and we size it two independent ways.
Top-down, from sector reporting. Industry analyses of the Golden Triangle put luxury turnover at roughly €3.2 billion in 2024, with around €1.6 billion of that in Marbella alone. Carrying that forward through 2025’s continued price growth and 2026’s more selective volumes, a flat-to-modest assumption puts Marbella’s prime turnover for the first half of 2026 in the region of €800 million to €1 billion.
Bottom-up, from official transaction counts. Marbella recorded roughly 2,190 sales per half-year on 2025 notarial data. With municipal average registered prices around €4,400/m² — meaning even a mid-sized 200 m² home at the average brushes €900,000 — we assume 20–25% of transactions clear the €1 million line, or some 440–550 deals per half-year. At an assumed prime average of €2.0–2.5 million per deal, that yields €0.9 to €1.4 billion.
≈ €1bn
Our central estimate of Marbella’s true half-year prime volume, where both methods converge
~14×
The multiple by which the €70M headline understated the market it appeared to describe
Treat the number as an order of magnitude, not a measurement — every input above is stated so it can be challenged. But both routes land in the same neighbourhood, and neither lands anywhere near €70 million.
What The Official Record Shows
Spain’s notaries are the only official source that publishes below municipal level, and their 2025 data give Marbella’s prime story a solid floor:
Official Market Snapshot
Average Registered Prices by Area (2025)
| Marbella Zone | Average Registered Price |
|---|---|
| Sierra Blanca | €5,479/m² |
| Nueva Andalucía / Puerto Banús | €4,287/m² |
| Marbella East | €4,076/m² |
| Marbella Centre | €4,020/m² |
| San Pedro Alcántara | €3,915/m² |
Market Volume & Context
| Indicator | Value |
|---|---|
| Golden Triangle residential sales (2025) | 8,540 transactions |
| Marbella’s share of Golden Triangle sales | 51.3% |
| Average price – Málaga Province (2025) | €3,232/m² (5th highest in Spain) |
| National house price growth (Q1 2026) | +3.2% quarter-on-quarter • +8.9% year-on-year |
Why No Official “Prime” Total Exists
A number nobody measures.Neither the Registradores, the Notariado nor the INE publishes a luxury tier. Any market-wide “prime” figure you read is an estimate built from agency or index data — useful, but not an official statistic. When a number sounds surprisingly small or surprisingly large, the first question is always the same: whose number is it, and what exactly does it count?
How To Read Market Figures Like An Insider
Four distinctions do most of the work:
Asking is not sold. Portal averages for Marbella run well above notarial transaction values — one measures hope, the other measures deeds. Registration is not signature. INE counts the month a sale is registered; the notaries count the month it’s signed, so the two series never quite align. Province is not town. Registradores and INE publish at province level only — a “Marbella” figure attributed to either has travelled further than it should. The Golden Triangle is not Marbella. Marbella, Estepona and Benahavís are often aggregated, then reported as one town’s numbers.
Sources
- Consejo General del Notariado, Portal Estadístico — Marbella municipal and sub-municipal data, 2025.
- Colegio de Registradores, Estadística Registral Inmobiliaria, Q1 2026 (published 7 May 2026).
- INE, Estadística de Transmisiones de Derechos de la Propiedad, monthly series to May 2026.
- Drumelia press release via Carmen Durán Comunicación, July 2026, as carried by Andalucía Económica and El Conciso.
- SUR in English, “Sales of prime property in Marbella…”, 18 July 2026 (updated 20 July 2026).
- Golden Triangle luxury turnover estimates (€3.2bn, 2024; ≈€1.6bn Marbella) from sector market reporting; treated here as industry estimates, not official statistics.
