2025 was a good year for rural property transactions, as according to the Fincalista report on "Land Market 2026. The new map of rural investment", it grew by 3.8% compared to 2024, with 165,000 operations carried out. With these data, the market has recovered and is at levels prior to the 2008 crisis, although in the opinion of Fincalista's CEO, Juan Prados Edwards, it has entered a phase of maturity with a drastic reduction in volatility in the last quarter of last year.
All these data were those that were presented at the celebration of CIFIR 2026, the fourth edition of the Iberian Congress of Rural Properties, organized by Fincalista at the headquarters of Banco Santander in Madrid and which gathered more than 700 people linked to agriculture, livestock, hunting, and the rural real estate sector of Spain and Portugal.
“Rural land is a stable market, which has presented much less volatility and uncertainty than urban land, without ignoring that that it produces food, the basic necessity par excellence. In this way, it promotes the increase of population in rural areas, it is a long-term tangible asset, it has a low correlation with inflation and generates stable returns”, Prados Edwards pointed out.
However, in its report it also points out that those productive farms that depend on labor are seeing their economic margins reach the limit after the increase in wage costs that have been experienced since 2019.
In this sense, the CEO of Fincalista considers that the rural sector is facing a change of cycle marked by stabilization and the search for operational efficiency.
Stable investment
PwC Real Estate Deals partner, Javier Kindelan, stated that rural land operations are growing because in comparisons with gold and oil, the agricultural sector demonstrates that it is a stable investment. "That is very appealing and will continue to attract institutional and private capital," added Kindelan.
In this regard, it highlighted the growing presence in the Spanish field of international investment funds and the development of family offices which represent 25% of investments with medium to long-term horizons, from 5 to 30 years.
As possible competitors in the interest and acquisition of rustic land and water, multiple data centers were pointed out, whose announcement is proliferating, in recent months, in different parts of Spain.
Two speeds
Another of the conclusions of the Fincalista report is the enormous difference between dryland farms and irrigated farms. While the latter, especially those linked to the production of vegetables or subtropicals in intensive farming, lead the dynamism, being the stars of the sector with a transaction volume exceeding 20% annually and a revaluation of up to 4.75%, dryland hectares show solid growth.
On the other hand, the investor in rustic properties operates mainly with own resources, since only 6.2% of the 2025 operations were carried out by mortgage compared to 52.5% for urban land.
In the fourth edition of CIFIR, in addition to presentations, round tables and networking spaces were held in which topics were addressed ranging from the international commercialization of agricultural products, the impact of mass consumption trends in the primary sector, or the management of technology applied to farms, among other topics.