Research · annual
The index does not reshuffle data from property portals or official statistics. It is built from the matters the firm handles in Marbella: what can be seen once a transaction is under way and has not yet reached any public register. That is its only reason to exist, and also its only difficulty.
The figures on the cover describe the scope of the instrument: series, threshold and calendar. The index has not yet measured anything.
Methodology
The index’s advantage, that the data is the firm’s own, is also its only serious problem. A case file is not a source: it is a client’s information. The whole method consists in getting from the second to the first without leaving an identifiable trace along the way. What follows is not a technical annex: it is the part that decides whether the report can be published.
The series is fed by the matters handled by Garzalex in Marbella and its surroundings, across the firm’s three practice areas. The record from which the data is aggregated contains no name, company, address, cadastral reference or file number: only variables. De-identification takes place before aggregation, not after, and the original case file never leaves the firm’s system.
No published figure rests on fewer than five case files. If a cell (a nationality, a bracket, a quarter) does not gather five, it is not published: it is aggregated upwards until it does, or it disappears from the report. The reason is not statistical; it is a matter of professional ethics. Marbella’s private market is small and closely watched: anyone operating in it can identify a transaction from three features (area, price band and month) without anyone naming it. The lawyer’s duty of confidentiality (the secreto profesional under the Estatuto General de la Abogacía Española, Royal Decree 135/2021, the regulation governing the Spanish legal profession) does not distinguish between naming and making recognisable; describing with sufficient precision is a form of naming. An index that needed to go below five in order to have something to say would be an index that should not yet be published.
When the report illustrates a finding with a case, that case does not exist. It is built from several case files that share the same pattern, altering everything that is not relevant to the pattern, and is declared composite in its own footnote. No example in the index corresponds to a real transaction or allows one to be reconstructed.
No prices of specific transactions are published, and no developments, urbanizaciones (residential estates), parties or counterparties are identified. Nor are third-party figures presented as our own: where the report draws on an external source, it is cited with its origin and its date, and kept separate from the firm’s series. What cannot be supported by the firm’s own case files, with the threshold met, stays out, even if it would make a better headline.
Format
Series 01 · Most active nationalities
Skeleton mock-up. The values (30 · 25 · 20 · 15 · 10) are round placeholders: they come from no measurement and must not be cited.
Series 04 · Where a purchase is delayed
Skeleton mock-up. Filler values (40 · 25 · 20 · 10 · 5). The first edition will replace each bar with the real series; this note will disappear with it.
The highlighted bar is the hypothesis the index puts to the test: that the delay in a purchase does not occur where the buyer fears it, in the financing or the notaría (the notary’s office), but in the planning check, weeks earlier, when it still seems that nothing has begun. If the series confirms it, the practical consequence is concrete and verifiable: a transaction’s calendar is decided before the reserva (reservation agreement) is signed. If it disproves it, it is published all the same, and the author of these lines will have learnt something. An index that only publishes what it expected to find is not an index: it is a brochure.
The index will be sent as a PDF and in print edition to those who have asked for it: one address, one mailing, once it exists. To receive the first edition, simply write to info@garzalex.com with the word “Index”. If you would also like to propose a question you would like to see measured, it will be read: several of the six series came from clients’ questions that the firm could not answer with data.