Middle floor apartments for sale in Marbella

Middle floor apartments for sale in Marbella are the single largest band of property in the municipality: 537 of them, priced between € 215,000 and € 6,100,000, the midpoint at € 649,000, 125 square metres of built area on average and € 5,888 the square metre. 400 have a pool. Middle floors are what a Marbella scheme is mostly made of, which makes this the most ordinary thing in the least ordinary town on the coast.

There is a specific argument here that does not apply further west, and it rests on what a Marbella scheme actually contains. The urbanisations in this municipality are the most heavily planted and most heavily serviced on the coast: mature gardens, several pools, gates and guards, lifts, and in the upper half of the market a concierge, a gym and a spa. Every flat in the building has the same access to all of it, and the middle floor is the cheapest way to buy it.

The same grounds, less capital

Put plainly: the gardens you walk through, the pool you swim in, the gate that keeps the street out and the guard who watches it are identical from any floor. In a municipality where those things are a large part of what the address means, the cheapest flat with full use of the grounds is the most efficient purchase in the scheme. It is why so many people who know Marbella well own middle floors.

What you decline

A private garden at one end of the building, a roof terrace at the other. Both are worth money and both carry maintenance. If neither is central to how you will use the property — and for an owner here a few weeks or months a year it frequently is not — then declining them is a decision rather than a sacrifice.

Why the per-metre figure looks high

At first glance this band appears dearer per square metre than the floors either side of it, and that is an artefact of the arithmetic rather than a market signal. Price per metre is calculated on built area, and a garden or a solarium is not built area at all, so the measure leaves out exactly what distinguishes the other bands. Middle floors are also concentrated in the expensive beachside blocks, where no garden was ever on offer. Compare whole prices within one building rather than per-metre figures across a municipality.

The blocks of the sixties and seventies were frequently built without one

Marbella put up a great many three and four-storey buildings in those two decades, and a meaningful number of the older ones have no lift at all. Two flights of stairs make a different property out of the same set of rooms, both to live in and to sell again, and in a municipality where a large share of buyers are retired that difference widens with every year. Listings rarely mention it and photographs never show a staircase.

The older stairwells climb in half-flights around an open well

They are worth seeing before the flat, because they are a large part of what daily life in these buildings is. The sixties blocks were drawn with wide tiled stairs, open landings and a well that lets the air through, which is cool in August and loud when children live in the building. The nineties schemes in the golf valley enclosed the stair and added the lift beside it, and this century's blocks run the lift down to the garage, so the car and the front door are on the same journey.

First floors hold their value best in a building without one

One flight suits almost everybody and two does not, so first floors in lift-free buildings hold value noticeably better. The corollary is that a third-floor flat without a lift, in an otherwise excellent scheme on a good street, can be the best buy in this whole category for somebody who genuinely does not mind the climb — and there are fewer such buyers than there are such flats.

The sixties and seventies blocks

Low, long, plainly detailed and set in gardens that have had half a century to grow. The rooms inside tend to be bigger than the asking price suggests, because they were drawn before anybody counted bedrooms, and the positions are ones no planning authority would grant today. Salt has been working on the render, the railings and the metalwork of these beachside buildings since before most of this coast existed, and it shows plainly on the ones nobody looked after. A well-kept block from that period is among the soundest things to own in Marbella.

The eighties and nineties schemes

The bulk of this page. Three and four storeys, communal pool, parking, gardens between the buildings, and layouts with hallways and separate kitchens rather than one room doing every job. Lifts are usual rather than universal. These are the flats that make up the ordinary working market of the municipality, they sell steadily, and two schemes that look identical from the street are rarely in the same condition behind the gate.

This century

Sealed terraces, insulation and glazing to current standards, underfloor heating in the bathrooms, lifts that run down to the garage, and more machinery behind the walls than any older block carries. The gardens are younger and the shade is thinner, which in August is not a small matter. The schemes still selling before completion are on new developments.

The lightest thing to own in Marbella

No garden to irrigate through a long dry summer, no solarium to maintain, nothing beyond the front door asking for attention while the place stands empty. For an owner who is elsewhere most of the year this is the least demanding property in the municipality: a middle floor can be shut up for months and nothing happens to it, which is why so many of them belong to people who are here for a few weeks at a time.

Letting, with the longest season on the coast

The holiday season in this municipality reaches from Easter into November, and golfers and business visitors cover a good part of what is left of the year, which is a longer calendar than anywhere west of here. Middle floors suit that market well, because a guest needs nothing outside the flat. A short let needs a licence from the region, and some of these urbanisations limit them as well; the paperwork and the diary sit with our rental service.

Resale

The widest pool of buyers in Spain and the largest supply, which means this band sells reliably rather than instantly. A middle floor with a lift, a good aspect and a well-kept scheme around it sells to anybody; the same flat up two flights in a building nobody has looked after waits for a particular buyer, and everything that separates the two is visible on the day you first walk in.