Apartments for sale in La Resina Golf

The list runs from € 280,000 to € 2,200,000, with the middle at € 555,000 and an average interior of 137 square metres. Most of what reaches it is existing stock and a steady minority is current building, which makes this one of the few addresses on the western Costa del Sol where both can be walked on the same slope in one afternoon.

The data we draw from carries no field for the name of a golf club, so the flats around the fairways are assigned here by hand, and the page also reaches into the district on the same slope. Every tile names where the property actually stands. What follows explains what sort of flat this address produces, why it costs less than the golf names further east, and what separates two homes behind different gates.

Flats in separate gated pockets strung along the roads that climb to one clubhouse.

Not one development but a dozen

Housing arrived around this course over two decades, in pockets, each with its own gate, pool, garden and quota. There is no single entrance and no single style, so the name on a listing tells you the valley and almost nothing about the building. Working out which community a flat belongs to is the first job here, and it tells you more than the floor plan does.

Middle floors in the main, penthouses above them

The typical home on this hillside is a middle floor with a covered terrace; below it sit ground floors with a strip of garden, and under the roof a substantial band of penthouses and duplex penthouses. Two and three bedrooms cover almost the whole of this market. The coast-wide segments are at middle floor apartments and penthouses.

Communal pools, and gardens with twenty years in them

Nearly everything up here comes with a shared pool, and most of it with planting that has had time to become shade. On a hillside that is worth more than it reads: a tree that covers a pool surround cannot be bought, only grown, and it is why the older pockets here keep their buyers against something finished this year across the road.

Three reasons, and only one of them is about the housing itself.

Nine holes rather than eighteen

The course is a nine-hole one with padel courts and a restaurant at the clubhouse, not a championship venue. For a resident that works better than it reads — a short round fits into an evening and the fees are a different order of money — but it does not carry the name premium an eighteen-hole address does. The buyer keeps the golf and pockets the difference.

The distance to Puerto Banús

A quarter of an hour of road is where most of the difference comes from. The same flat beside a course near Nueva Andalucía asks appreciably more, and what that difference buys is proximity to a marina rather than a better home. For anybody who visits Puerto Banús four times a year rather than four times a week it is the easiest money on this coast to save. The valley behind the marina is at apartments in Nueva Andalucía.

And the boom-year stock that has since been refurbished

Several communities here went up when building was quick and have been brought up to standard since, which produces a particular kind of bargain: a sound building in a good position at a figure set by its age rather than by its condition. It also produces the opposite, and the gap between a refurbished flat and a tired one is where the real money sits on this page.

Four things, in the order a buyer should weigh them.

Which community, first and by a distance

Age, upkeep, facilities and the size of the quota differ sharply between the gated pockets up here, and two flats behind different gates can be worth quite different money for that alone. Walking two communities before looking at a third flat settles more than any set of particulars: the difference is obvious on the ground and invisible on paper.

What the terrace looks at

Fairway, sea, mountain or car park — and on a hillside those four are a permanent condition rather than a preference. A fairway outlook carries one nuisance and one pleasure: the mowers before breakfast, and open green that nobody can ever build on.

New against existing

The current schemes on this slope bring thicker walls, better glass, underground parking and nothing to repair. The older ones bring grown gardens, a settled community and a lower figure. Both arguments are real and the hillside lets you test them within a few hundred metres, which almost nowhere else on this coast does. Everything still under construction stands at new developments.

And whether the work has been done

Glazing, kitchen, bathrooms and air conditioning on a flat of this period are the items that cost real money. A refurbished home asks more and needs nothing; a cheaper one needs that work at today's prices, so the two belong compared on the total rather than on the asking figure.

Two markets, and most owners only think of one.

The golf season is not the beach season

Players come in spring and autumn, when the coast is empty and the walking is good, which fills exactly the weeks a beachside flat cannot. An owner marketing a golf flat as a summer let is competing with the shoreline and losing; one marketing it as a shoulder-season base is competing with almost nobody.

The school term is the steadier income

A hillside with an international school on it has a long-let market the coast does not: families who arrive for a school year rather than a fortnight, who want an unfurnished flat for ten months and who are gone in June. Less money per week, and a great deal less work.

And each gate goes its own way

These communities were built at different times and have decided things separately ever since, so what is customary behind one gate is not necessarily customary next door. On this hillside the gate is the unit, not the district. What we take on for owners who let is at rental services.

The rest of the hillside, the other types on it and the shore below.

The same slope, next door

The district sharing this hillside carries the bulk of the apartment communities, on the same road, behind the same kind of gate and under the same outlook. Anybody looking here should be looking at both names: Selwo, with its own flats at apartments in Selwo.

Houses and land on the same hillside

Villas on terraced plots and a row of newer houses stand above and below the flats, and a handful of serviced parcels still reach the market up here. The hillside answers all three questions at one address, which is rare. They are at houses in La Resina Golf and plots in La Resina Golf, with the address itself described at La Resina Golf.

And the beaches below the hill

The long sand beaches east of Estepona lie a few minutes down, which is where this hillside swims rather than where it lives. New flats up here arrive one at a time rather than in releases, so the property alarm saves the checking, and our estate agents in Estepona can name the gates one by one.