According to INE, this year-on-year increase "is explained by the acceleration of the price of new housing, which increased by 5.4%, 1.2 percentage points (pp) more than in the previous quarter, reaching the highest level since the third quarter of 2014."

"This was the second consecutive period in which there was an acceleration in the prices of new housing, which contrasts with the change seen for existing housing, whose year-on-year rate of change increased from 9.2% in the first quarter of 2017 to 8.9%," INE said.

This was the "first time since the last quarter of 2015" in which there was a decline in the growth rate of prices of existing housing.

Against the previous quarter, IPHab increased by 3.2% (2.1% in the first quarter of 2017), which made this period "the second consecutive quarter in which prices accelerated, having been more expressive in the case of new housing (3.3% compared to 0.8% in the first quarter of 2017) than in existing housing (3.2% in the second quarter and 2.5% in the first quarter of 2017).

Between April and June 2017, the average annual rate of change of IPHab reached 7.8%, a new high for the current series, with annual average rates of existing and new housing of 9.1 % and 4.2%, respectively.

In the second quarter of 2017, 36,886 units were traded, a year-on-year increase of 16.1% and an increase of 4.9% over the previous quarter.

For the same period, sales increased by 23.3% year-on-year and 6.3% compared to the previous quarter, to around €4.6 billion, of which close to €3.7 billion were transactions related to existing housing.