The excess mortality, a consequence of the pandemic and the hospital collapse between 2020 and 2021, has translated into an increase in inheritances, with a significant increase in 2021 in both renunciations and acceptances. This is reflected in the latest data from the Statistical Information Center of Notaries (CIEN), released by the General Council of Notaries, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the arrival of Covid in our lives. Acceptances of inheritances marked an all-time high in 2021 by reaching 365,649, 22.2% more than in 2020. After a year of significant declines, the real estate sector recovered in 2021, with year-on-year growth of 38.2% in home sales and purchases.

Inheritance-related acts can take a long time to be carried out, making them a lagged variable with respect to mortality trends. This circumstance, together with the “wait or rebound” effect, seems to explain why many of the transactions were formalized during 2021, rather than in 2020, which had a much higher excess mortality. Thus, 2021 saw the largest increase in inheritance acceptances and, moreover, set an all-time record: 365,649 acceptances were granted, 22.2% more than in 2020. In turn, in the renunciation of inheritances, an increase of 25% was recorded in 2021. This rate breaks the trend of contraction in the 2020 series and represents the highest in the historical series since 2007, up to 56,557 operations.

Wills, on the rise

On the other hand, the number of wills reached 723,642 in 2021, increasing by 92,406 compared to those granted in 2020, which is an increase of 14.6%, the highest year-on-year rise in the series of wills since it began to be recorded in the CIEN database in 2007.

Of these, 98% (708,832) were open unipersonal wills, in which the person making the will expresses the provisions of the will in the presence of a notary. The remaining 2% are made up of other types of wills or last wills, such as closed or holographic wills.

The increase in uncertainty about the future, the increase in mortality and, in short, the growing concern of citizens about the possibility of a sudden death caused by the effects of the pandemic may have motivated many of them to leave all their estate matters unresolved.

Real estate recovery

The pandemic and mobility restrictions led to declines in the real estate market in 2020. According to CIEN data, the number of home sales and purchases reached 490,207, 14.6% less than in 2019, a year in which transactions were close to 575,000 operations. A trend that was largely reversed in 2021, with a year-on-year growth of 38.2%, reaching 677,455 transactions.

With the deployment of the de-escalation phase in June 2020 and the easing of restrictions during the third quarter, the recovery in real estate transactions began. And the difference by housing type became visible and persistent thereafter. Apartments continued to show a negative evolution during the second half of the year, averaging a cumulative year-on-year fall of 3.5%. Single-family housing, on the other hand, soared, posting an average increase of 22.8% year-on-year in the second half of the year. The positive performance in this period helped single-family housing not to miss out on a large number of transactions and to record a 3.1% decline in 2020, much more moderate than the 17.9% decline experienced by apartment-type housing.

During 2021, both apartments and single-family homes recorded similar increases (38.3% vs. 37.8%), which shows that the change in consumer preferences has been maintained because, if it had been a temporary effect, the increase in apartment homes should have been substantially higher than that of single-family homes, which did not occur.

Thus, the trend of purchases before and after the advent of the pandemic has changed. In the previous years, 80% of home sales were for apartments and the remaining 20% for single-family homes. The latter percentage rebounded to 25% with the advent of the crisis in 2020 and remained constant also in 2021.

Growth in donations

On the other hand, donations also registered a significant increase, reaching 174,866 in 2021, which represented an increase of 30.7% over those of 2020. In this sense, predictably, due, among other reasons, to intra-family and intergenerational solidarity to alleviate the effects of the economic crisis.

Fuente: Noticias Jurídicas