The firm’s own data: what can only be measured from inside a case file, anonymised, aggregated and published once a year with its method set out first.
Annual edition · Programme 2027 to 2029
The reports are kept upright, like books on a shelf. One a year, each under the year that belongs to it.
An editorial calendar, not a catalogue: no edition has closed yet. The year indicates when the series is expected to reach the threshold that allows it to be published. Only the Index has an open page.
Research · annual edition
A report is written by compiling what is already published: official statistics, portal bulletins, trade press. Doing so is legitimate and costs nothing; anyone can do it, and the reader can tell. Research is something else. The series does not come from outside: it comes from the matters the firm handles in Marbella, from what can be seen once a transaction is under way and has not yet reached any public register.
The distance between the two words is the distance between publishing a report and being a source. A source is cited. That is why Research comes out once a year, and comes out with its method set out first: a figure of the firm’s own that does not explain how it was obtained is worth exactly the same as an invented one.
Method
The advantage of Research, 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 a report can be published.
The series is fed by the matters Garzalex handles across its 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 price bracket, a quarter) does not gather five, 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 luxury market is small and closely watched, and anyone operating in it can recognise 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. A report that needs to go below five in order to have something to say is a report that should not yet be published.
When an edition illustrates a finding with a case, that case does not exist: it is built from several case files that share the same pattern, everything not relevant to that pattern is altered, and it is declared composite in its own footnote. No example in Research corresponds to a real transaction or allows one to be reconstructed.
The first edition of the Index will close when the series reach the threshold, and not before: it requires twelve months of structured data capture, under way since this year. There is no launch date, no previews and no waiting list. Anyone who wishes to receive it can let us know via the contact page, and will receive it on the day it closes. Until then, the page for the Index explains what will be measured, and by what rules.
Annual edition
Research is published once a year. Those who request it receive the complete edition as a PDF and, when it goes to press, the printed copy. There are no mailings other than those.
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