The Art of Living in Spain
Who actually buys a suite in a longevity resort, and what has to be true for them to believe in it?
The challenge
WOW Services sells freehold suites in a Blue-Zone-inspired wellness and golf resort in Murcia to private investors. 275 suites with seven clinical longevity labs attached. My job was the customer and market research behind who that buyer is, and how the proposition should be put to them.
Method
Search side. I also worked on how the brand surfaced in search, classical SEO and answer-engine optimisation both, using tools such as Trajaan to see how the brand was being represented in AI-generated answers rather than only in blue links.
The insight
It was being sold as an investment, so the pitch led with the numbers. You own the suite outright, you rent it back to the resort for 99 years, you get a fixed 7% a year, and the payments during construction are guaranteed by a bank.
The problem is that those numbers are not special. The average rental yield in Murcia is 7.19%. Anyone who only wants a return can get that without tying their money up for 99 years, waiting for a building that is not finished until 2029, and buying something they have to fly to. The growth figures explain why this kind of development is spreading. They do not explain why you would pick this one.
What the others do not have is seven longevity clinics on site, four to six weeks a year in the suite yourself, and the right to pass those weeks on to your children. So the personal use is not a bonus attached to an investment. It is the thing people are actually buying, and the investment is how they pay for it.
Nobody buys a 7% return they have to fly to. They buy the reason to go. The yield is how they justify it afterwards.
The direction
A buyer segmentation that separates the two motives the proposition had been selling as one, and a repositioning that inverts the order of the pitch: open on the life the suite buys, close on the return that makes it defensible. Same facts, opposite sequence.
The practical consequence is that the personal-use clause stops being a footnote in the financial annex and becomes the headline, and that the buyer being profiled is a family making a decision about the next twenty years, not an investor comparing yields on a spreadsheet.
The study
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The Murcia market study, produced with Taolis Research & Analytics, July 2025.
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The blind spot. International funds concentrate on Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Marbella. Murcia is absent from national investment reports despite outperforming them.
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The case in three numbers. Capital flows lag, yields lead, prices grow fastest.
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Investment momentum is not market logic. Madrid and Barcelona took nearly half of all institutional real estate investment in 2023, while Murcia posted the highest home-sales growth in Spain.
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Yield. Murcia leads all five benchmark cities at 7.19% gross rental yield, against Marbella’s 4.98%.
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Price growth. Residential prices rose 20.5% in 2024, nearly double the national average of 11.3%.
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Economic performance. GDP per capita on par with Valencia, with one of Spain’s lowest cost-of-living indexes at 48.5.
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Regulation. Barcelona is phasing out short-term rentals by 2028 and Málaga has imposed a moratorium. Murcia has no equivalent restriction.
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Supply. Spain formed 259,167 households in 2023 but issued only 127,500 new-home permits, a shortfall of 131,667 units a year.
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Tourism. Foreign arrivals up 18.6%, close to four times Barcelona’s rate, with a 94% repeat visitor rate.
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The competitive edge. Affordability, regulatory stability and a structural supply gap, drawn together.
Where it went
Where it went
The research was used in two places. The marketing team took the buyer picture and the positioning into how they talk to clients, which changed what a conversation opens on and what it closes on.
The market findings then went into the company’s investment deck, the one shown to investors. The same Murcia comparison that argues the region is underpriced against Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Marbella works as evidence for a buyer and as evidence for an investor, so it did both jobs.
Context
Altaona Sports & Wellness Resort, Murcia. 275 suites across 23,500 m², seven longevity labs, an 18-hole championship course, and 300+ days of sunshine a year. Named Best Leisure Development Spain at the International Property Awards 2025.
The development sells in phases, each at a lower fixed return as inventory tightens. Phase 1 closed at €52M in sales volume; Phase 2 is currently open at 7% NET, with Phase 3 triggered at €85M.
What I am not claiming
Those phase figures are the development’s, not mine. I have not tried to attribute any of them to the repositioning, because a sales phase moves for many reasons and I cannot separate them.