They look like prices from another era, but they are real. A duplex near the Sagrada Família was being bought for 250,000 euros in the Barcelona of 2015. It was not a broom closet: it had 4 bedrooms, more than 100m2 and was located in one of the most central streets of Barcelona (Sant Antoni Maria Claret).
Prices like these are the ones that could be seen in real estate portals 10 years ago, in the middle of the real estate crisis and just at the point where the housing market began to recover after the cash of 2008. To find them we have resorted to the Wayback Machine tool, where images and screenshots of web pages are stored in chronological order.
The following ads, all from 2015 as well, have also come from old screenshots of the Idealista website.
The evolution of the price persquare meter in Barcelona in the last 10 years.
A quick calculation of the price per square meter of these ads yields data that for the time were already high: about 2,300 euros per square meter. In the same area, calculated with ads from 2025, the price exceeds 4,500 €/m2.
The upward trend of the real estate market in Barcelona and Catalonia is evidenced by reports such as that of La Vanguardia, which at the end of 2024 already spoke of a year-on-year increase of 6.2%. “In the city as a whole, the average price was 2,719 €/m² in 2013 while, in the first half of 2024, this reached 4,398.7 €/m². This is an increase of 61.8% in these ten years,” explains the report that brings together public data on sales and purchases registered in Barcelona.
The Idealista data portal speaks of a growth from May 2024 to May 2025 of more than 10% of the average sale price of real estate in the city of Barcelona.
The same portal, which today sets the average price perm2 at 4,800 €, in 2013 recorded ads with average sale prices below 3,000 €.
How to find old real estate portal ads
In Wayback Machine, URL captures are stored by date. So to consult these old ads, we must look for screenshots of current pages, such as the default page of buying and selling apartments in Barcelona of Idealista or Fotocasa.
By entering it in the search engine, we will get all the screenshots of the same page that have been saved over time. In this way, we can access snapshots in time of ads or even see what the design of the websites was like a few years ago.