For decades, one rule has dominated real estate: location, location, location. But how do you know whether a location is changing? Until recently, the answer in Spain was simple: look at prices. That is changing.
In October 2025, the Consejo General del Notariado opened its housing statistics portal to the public. For the first time, anyone can explore prices recorded in notarised transactions by location, rather than relying on asking prices.¹
It is an important step forward. But it raises a bigger question: what moves those prices in the first place?
Transaction prices look backwards
A transaction is the end of a process. By the time a price appears in the data, buyers and sellers have already responded to what is happening around the property: shifts in demand, financing, construction, infrastructure, regulation, demographics and the physical environment.
And housing markets adjust slowly. Homes trade infrequently, transactions are expensive, and buyers and sellers hold different information. Across Europe, only about a fifth of the gap between prices and their fundamentals closes within a year.² The market can be changing long before the price data shows it. A neighbourhood may be gaining residents, new homes may be coming to market, lending conditions or planning rules may be shifting, and exposure to heat, drought or flooding may be rising.
For a professional, that is a practical risk: a valuation, listing presentation or investment decision based on what a location was, rather than what it is becoming.
The missing layer is location
Professionals know the property in detail: bedrooms, surface area, energy rating, condition. The location is usually reduced to a postcode, a municipality or a market average.
Yet two similar properties can have very different prospects simply because of where they stand. The information to understand those locations already exists, spread across public statistics, planning and construction records, demographic and financial data, infrastructure and, increasingly, climate data. The challenge is not a lack of data. It is making that data useful for one specific location.
What moves first?
Research on European housing markets consistently points to demand, financial and supply conditions as key drivers of prices.³ ⁴ But these forces do not move at the same speed, or with the same intensity, everywhere.
Population and migration shape demand. Credit conditions shape what buyers can afford. Construction shapes future supply. Infrastructure shapes accessibility, regulation shapes what can be built, and climate shapes the long-term risks of a place. Some of these signals play out over a few years; others, particularly demographics and climate, over decades. Europe is already warming faster than the global average, which makes those long-term changes increasingly relevant to real estate.⁵
None of these signals predicts the price of a particular property. Together, they explain what is changing around it.
From data to location intelligence
That is what we are building at Fitin. We bring together fragmented data on the forces shaping a location and turn it into a clear, continuously updated view, starting in Spain across nearly 1,000 municipalities.
Our technology does what is hard to do by hand: combining many different datasets, structuring them, identifying what matters for a location, and turning it into something a professional can use.
It does not replace professional judgement. The data should be transparent and verifiable; the interpretation belongs to the professional, who knows the streets, the buildings and the clients. Fitin brings the underlying location data into that conversation.
A new kind of conversation
Imagine showing a buyer more than the asking price or the average price per square metre. Is the local population growing? Is new housing being built? What infrastructure is coming, and which regulations matter? How exposed is the area to heat, drought or flooding? And how have these signals changed over time?
That matters, because clients increasingly have access to prices themselves. The professional's value lies more and more in explaining what those prices mean.
What if location is the real asset?
Real estate's oldest rule says: location, location, location. We would change it to: location, property, location. You buy the property. You invest in the location. Its population, infrastructure, regulations and climate can all change, and those changes keep shaping a property's value long after the keys have changed hands.
At Fitin, we are building the data layer that makes those changes visible. We are starting with Spain. The ambition is Europe.
One location at a time.
Request a demo and see these signals for your own market.
Sources
¹ Consejo General del Notariado (23 October 2025). Los notarios presentan su Portal de la Vivienda con precios reales del mercado. Press release.
² Valderrama, L., Gorse, P., Marinkov, M. and Topalova, P. (2023). European Housing Markets at a Turning Point – Risks, Household and Bank Vulnerabilities, and Policy Options. IMF Working Paper 23/76. International Monetary Fund.
³ Cunha, A. M. and Lobão, J. (2021). The determinants of real estate prices in a European context: a four-level analysis. Journal of European Real Estate Research, 14(3), 331–348.
⁴ Melecký, A. and Paksi, D. (2024). Drivers of European housing prices in the new millennium: demand, financial, and supply determinants. Empirica, 51(3), 731–753.
⁵ Copernicus Climate Change Service and World Meteorological Organization (2026). European State of the Climate 2025.