Wtf: Why Nobody Can Agree on the Numbers

If you’ve ever tried to figure out exactly how many homes are selling in Spain in a given month, you’ve probably ended up staring at a bunch of conflicting numbers, scratching your head.

Take March 2026, for example. If you look at the official headline news, you are told one thing. If you log into the back-end statistical portals (Penotariado), you see another. And if you check the government’s registry data, you get a third.

We are talking about gaps of over 12,000 sales for the exact same month.

I noticed this massive discrepancy recently and decided to ask the Notaries directly: Why is there such a huge difference between your official monthly press reports and your own internal statistical portal?

Their response was a classic piece of bureaucratic phrasing, but once you translate it into plain English, it exposes exactly how the real estate data sausage is made. Here is the full story of what they told me, why their initial excuse didn’t hold water, and what the real reasons are.

The Mystery of the Missing 12,000 Sales

Let’s look at the three numbers on the table for Spanish residential property sales in March 2026:

• The Notary Press Report: 65,725 sales

• The INE (National Institute of Statistics): 61,295 sales

• The Notary Statistical Portal (Raw Data): 53,364 sales

How can the same organisation (The Notaries) publish a headline report claiming nearly 66,000 homes were sold, while their own data portal stubbornly insists the number is barely over 53,000?

When pressed on this 20% gap, the Notaries provided a formal explanation. They stated that the two platforms use completely different methodologies. Specifically, they claimed that the raw portal data only shows open-market housing (vivienda libre), whereas the monthly press report includes subsidised housing (vivienda protegida) and applies a “statistical extrapolation.”

Calling Out the “Subsidised Housing” Excuse

At first glance, blaming it on subsidised housing sounds reasonable. But if you actually cross-reference the data, that excuse immediately falls apart.

According to the INE, there were exactly 3,795 subsidised homes sold in Spain in March 2026.

Do the math: if you take the portal’s raw count of 53,364 and add those 3,795 subsidised sales, you get 57,159. That still leaves a massive, unexplained gap of more than 8,500 sales to reach the headline figure of 65,725.

So, what is actually going on?

The Real Reasons Behind the Discrepancies

The massive variation isn’t a math error; it’s a result of two very distinct structural realities in how real estate data is gathered: The Administrative Lag and The Statistical Guesswork.

1. Notaries vs. INE: The Paperwork Lag

The gap between the Notaries (around 65k) and the INE (61k) is purely a matter of timing.

• Notaries record a sale the exact day the buyer and seller sign the public deed (escritura). It represents real-time economic activity.

• The INE pulls its data from the Land Registry (Registro de la Propiedad). It takes anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks for a notary deed to be processed, taxes to be paid, and the property to be officially registered.

• The Result: The INE’s “March” numbers are actually an accurate reflection of what happened back in January and February.

2. Portal vs. Press Report: Raw Data vs. Proportional Forecasts

The much larger gap—the 12,000-sale chasm between the two Notary numbers—comes down to the second part of their explanation: “extrapolación estadística.”

The internal Statistical Portal relies on the Índice Único Informatizado, a digital database where every individual notary office across Spain uploads its finalized paperwork. But notary offices are busy, and there is a major structural delay in uploading files. The 53,364 number is simply the raw, incomplete count of the files that happened to be uploaded by the time the portal refreshed.

However, the media, banks, and big funds demand real-time data now. They can’t wait months for a small-town notary to upload their backlog.

To solve this, the Notaries release a Monthly Press Report. They take the incomplete raw data they have on hand, look at historical trends of how much data is usually missing, and mathematically scale up the number to estimate what the final total will be.

The Verdict: Which Number Should You Trust?

So, who do you trust when everyone is giving you a different answer? It depends entirely on what you are trying to do:

• Trust the Monthly Press Report (65,725) if you want the immediate market “vibe.” If you need to know how the market is moving right now or what sentiment is doing, this estimated figure is the industry benchmark.

• Trust the INE (61,295) if you want an indisputable paper trail. If you need solidified, legally stamped, non-estimated data and don’t mind a two-month lag, the Land Registry is the gold standard.

• Trust the Statistical Portal (53,364) only when looking backward. If you look at March 2026 on that portal a year from now, you will see that the 53,000 figure has climbed up toward the 60,000s. Use the portal for clean historical research (older than 6 months), but ignore it for recent months where it chronically undercounts the market.

Any clearer?