What is Scandinavia?
Scandinavia isn’t a country, yet often the Swedish, Norwegians or Danish people are called Scandinavian people. So, what is Scandinavia exactly? According to Wikipedia, Scandinavia is:
- Denmark
- Norway
- Sweden
What’s confusing is that Scandinavia may refer to the broader region, which includes:
- Finland
- Iceland
Scandinavia: 25 million people
Sweden is the most populated country in Scandinavia, with 10 million inhabitants. However Denmark, Finland and Norway are also significant in terms of population, with 5 million people each.
- Sweden: 10 million inhabitants
- Denmark: 5.7 million inhabitants
- Finland: 5.5 million inhabitants
- Norway: 5.3 million inhabitants
- Iceland: 330K inhabitants
Do they speak the same language in Scandinavia?
Do Swedish and Norwegian people speak the same language?
“Finnish is a language that is vastly diverse from any of the other Scandinavian languages. In fact, a Finnish-speaking person wouldn’t understand a word of Icelandic or Danish. That’s how different they are.” – Wordminds.com
However, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish can be looked as three sister languages, and are indeed very similar.
Scandinavian buyers in real estate
Now that we know more about Scandinavian people and language, let’s see how important they are in southern real estate markets. Although we could speak about Scandinavian buyers in France or Portugal, we will stick here to Spain.
Scandinavian buyers in Spain
In Spain, Scandinavian buyers are quite present:
- Sweden: #5 nationality of buyers
- Norway: #12 nationality of buyers
- Denmark: #19 nationality of buyers
Yet in some regions, such as Andalusia, Swedish are the #2 biggest foreign buyers. Indeed, Swedes represent 10% of foreign buyers in Marbella and Costa del Sol.
Consequently, Sweden’s leading real estate agency, Fastighetsbyran, started opening real estate agencies in Spain in 2008 and in Portugal in 2014. Furthermore, other real estate agencies such as MarbellaLiving hired a Swedish team, to deal with this market.
How to sell properties to Scandinavian buyers?
To sell to Scandinavian buyers, the first thing is to get to know the leading websites for this.
- Leading real estate websites in Sweden
- Leading property portals in Denmark
- Leading property websites in Finland
- Leading real estate sites in Norway
Start reading above, and contact me to start selling more to Scandinavian buyers.