Despite the sweltering heat, the numerous cranes that are concentrated in the promising 'golden mile' of Alicante maintain a slow but incessant activity. High-level apartments, which a decade and a half ago were being traded on plans that the global financial crisis cornered in real estate offices on the verge of ruin, are close to being occupied in the Benalúa Sur neighborhood, opposite the city's port. Fifteen years of countless hardships have passed for the construction sector that now, in July 2023, registers for the first time since then a similar number of homes approved in the province of Alicante.
It is the Official College of Quantity Surveyors, Technical Architects and Building Engineers of Alicante who provides the data: 3,001 homes started according to the visas registered from April to the end of June. The data shows a growth in the second quarter of 2023 of 99%, practically double, compared to the same period of 2022, and 49% better than the first quarter of the current year.
The president of the College, Carlos Casas, affirms that "the figures for the quarter are exceptional, and if in the first three months of the year the fear of slowdown was frightened, today it is confirmed that the sector is very strong, at levels not reached since 2008, with its best quarter since that year".
And he adds: “If we add the figures for the first six months of 2023, 5,018 homes are computed. Or what is the same, 87% more than in the first half of 2022, which closed with 2,833 homes.
One more quarter, the Alicante region that acts as the locomotive of the sector is Vega Baja, which in this second quarter represented 47% of the total housing starts throughout the province. The growth from April to June of this year compared to the same quarter of 2022 is 145%, with a total of 1,404 new homes registered. This number represents a 58% improvement on the results of the first quarter of the year, which were already very positive.
La Vega Baja thus manages to stand at levels higher than those prior to the pandemic, in 2019, if we take the last 12 months as a reference. But, given that it has not managed to reach the maximum level of activity that was registered in the first quarter of 2019, the sector considers that there is still room for growth.
It is also noteworthy the promotional activity in the Las Marinas regions, in the north of the province. In the second quarter, 633 homes were started, which represents a growth of 87% compared to the second quarter of 2022. Although in this quarter the number of homes is 12% lower than in the first quarter of 2023, the truth is that the semester closed with 1,351 homes, 120% more than in the first half of 2022.
"Activity in the Marinas is above pre-pandemic levels (32%), a situation already reached last quarter, but unlike in the south of the province, it is at its highest since 2008, with which the expansion from the current figures means entering territory not seen in the last 15 years," analyzes Casas.
The third region experiencing a considerable increase in construction activity is L'Alacantí. The second quarter of 2023 registered no less than 194% more visas than in the same period of the previous year and 134% more than the first quarter of this year. And it is a piece of information that breaks a downward trend that had been taking place in the last twelve months in the region of the provincial capital, which since the first of 2022 had chained four quarters of falls.
In the opposite direction, the areas of Elx and the interior of the province have behaved. In these territories, activity improves compared to 2022, but decreases with the first quarter of the year. In Elche the figure for the quarter is 217% better than in 2022, but 21% lower than the data for the first quarter.
The city with the most activity in this second quarter is Alicante, with 421 homes, but among the first seven there are four towns in Vega Baja: Torrevieja is the second (407 homes), followed by San Miguel de Salinas (275), Dénia (260), Guardamar del Segura (204), Mutxamel (170) and Orihuela (168); Elx is in ninth place with 129 homes and Benidorm in tenth with 110.
