Townhouses for sale in Marbella

Townhouses for sale in Marbella are the cheapest built square metre in the municipality: € 4,541, against € 5,990 for an apartment and € 6,867 for a detached villa. There are 147 of them, starting at € 235,000 — the least expensive way to own a house in this town — and reaching € 2,700,000, with the middle of the list at € 750,000, 188 square metres of house and 101 square metres of private outside space.

This is the category that puts a whole house within reach in the dearest municipality on the coast. Three floors, a front door at street level and a garage that belongs to the property, a walled patio behind, in most cases a terrace on the roof, and lawns and a pool that the scheme looks after — all of it for less per square metre than a flat in the same town.

The comparison that decides it

Hold a figure from the middle of this list against the alternatives it reaches. One is a row house in the eastern estates: bedrooms on their own floor, a garage for the bicycles, a patio big enough for a table, a school run of ten minutes. The other is a flat closer to the water with a lift and a good address. Both are sound purchases and they are two different ways of living, and households that work it through on paper choose the house far more often than the pricing would suggest.

Why it costs the least per metre

Buyers arrive in this municipality with two words in their heads, villa and apartment, and a house in a row is neither. It collects a fraction of the searches, and the price here follows the attention rather than the merits. In a town where demand from abroad bids up every other category, that is an unusual gap, and it has stayed open for years.

What you are accepting

Two shared walls and a staircase are the whole of what a row house gives up. Everything else about living inside a gated garden scheme here is the same as it is for the detached house three streets away, and the figure paid for it is closer to half.

The seventies and eighties

Drawn when ground was plentiful and nobody was counting bedrooms, so the rooms are wide, the hallways are generous and the patio is larger than anything built since. Party walls are blockwork, floors are tiled, and nothing in the construction absorbs sound. The oldest rows offer the most house for the money and the least certainty about the wall, and the roof above the top bedroom is of the same vintage.

The nineties and two-thousands

The bulk of the category: three levels, garage below, living space onto a patio, bedrooms above, frequently a roof terrace, and a community maintaining the roads and the pool. Construction is more consistent and the accounts are easier to read. This is where most buyers will end up.

And almost nothing new

Barely anything in this category is new build, because developers in this municipality put up apartments and detached houses — those are the two words the market asks for by name. The compensation is gardens that have had thirty years to grow, with shade where a new scheme has none; the cost is that modern insulation and glazing standards are not on offer anywhere in this band.

Who they suit

Families, above all: children on their own floor, guests on another, and somewhere for bicycles and wet towels that is not the hall. Also anyone working from home who wants a room with a door at the far end of the house. That separation is what no flat of the same floor area can offer at any price.

Who they do not

Anyone for whom stairs are already a consideration, or are likely to become one. Bedrooms on the top level and a car on the bottom one adds up to a great deal of climbing across a decade, and a house cannot be retrofitted with a lift the way a block can. Think about how you expect to be living in fifteen years rather than next summer. A noticeable share of the houses coming back onto this page are there because somebody did not.

Some rows include a bedroom on the entry level

Some schemes here include houses with a bedroom and a bathroom on the entry level. If stairs are a concern but a house is still what you want, that arrangement exists and should be asked for by name, because an agent will not think to mention it.

The roof belongs to the house rather than to the scheme

In an apartment block a tired membrane is everybody's business and is shared out by quota. In a row it sits above one top-floor bedroom and belongs to the household underneath it. Where there is a terrace on top, people have been walking on that surface for years, and planters, posts and anything screwed down do it no favours. A row built in one season tends to need its roofs doing in one season too, so in practice the whole terrace renews itself within a few years of itself.

A walled patio can be in shade from October to March

Two party walls, a neighbour's boundary behind and a house three storeys high on the fourth side make a patio that the winter sun never reaches. Which way it faces decides everything: south and west and it is the best room of the house, north and east and it is a cold store with a table in it. The aspect of the patio is the thing no set of photographs ever shows, and it is why two houses in the same row live so differently.

The garages were drawn for the cars of their day

Most of these rows went up when a family car was a good deal shorter and narrower than it is now, and the doors and the internal lengths followed suit. On the sloping schemes the ramp down to the garage is often steep as well, and the turn at the bottom tight. It is a detail rather than a drawback — but it is the one that decides whether the car lives inside the house or on the street outside the gate.

The terrace on top is where the sea appears

In the golf valley and on the eastern slopes the rows step down the hillside, so the ground floor looks at the wall of the garden and the roof terrace looks over the houses below it to the water. In a stepped row the view is on the top floor, not behind the sitting room. Flat schemes in the west have no such trick, and there the roof terrace trades the sea for evening sun and privacy.

Which way the row runs was decided once, for every house in it

A row laid out east to west gives every patio in it the same sun; a row running up the slope gives every house the same view down the hill; a row turned the wrong way gives neither to half of them. The developer settled that in one drawing, and nothing done inside a house afterwards changes it. The orientation of the row outranks the condition of any single house in it, which is why the same scheme is worth walking end to end.

The neighbouring categories, in order of what they add: semi-detached houses in Marbella for one wall fewer and a larger garden, detached villas for four free walls and the premium attached to them, and houses for all of it at once.

If the stairs are the obstacle, the closest equivalent without them is ground floor apartments with their own gardens, with the whole flat market on apartments in Marbella and the municipality as a whole on property for sale in Marbella. West of the municipality the same house asks appreciably less, and up in the hills the gradient gives every row its view: townhouses along the rest of the coast and Benahavís inland. As this category is almost entirely resale, anything built to current standards sits on new developments, and the property alarm is the way to hear about an end-of-row house with a sunny patio before it is gone.