Marbella's published rental yields are gross. Half the buyer pool calculates them on advertised rather than achieved rents. The third leg of the deception is that 2026 is the year Spain's short-term rental regime tightened materially, and most yield projections still model the 2022–2024 environment.
What the cost stack does to a headline yield, and why this guide publishes no percentage of its own:
Above €3M property value, Marbella is materially a capital-appreciation play, not a yield play. Anyone modelling a Sierra Blanca villa on yield should reconsider the asset class.
Long lets: the gross figure you will be quoted comes from advertised rent divided by asking price, and neither half of that fraction is what actually happens. What the owner keeps depends on the residency structure, the management arrangement and the void weeks, and no public dataset records any of them for this market.
Short lets: the headline is higher and the cost stack is much heavier — licence compliance, management at 18–25% of gross, cleaning between stays, and a season that concentrates the income into a few months. The direction is knowable; the number is not, and anyone quoting one for the market as a whole has estimated it.
At the top of the market the arithmetic often goes negative: a €5M villa let long-term, once the full operating stack and the non-resident tax position are counted, can cost more to hold than it earns. Buyers at that level are rarely buying income. What they are buying instead is not something this page will quantify — Spain publishes no per-property closing prices, so no appreciation series for these addresses exists, and a forecast would be a guess with a decimal point.
Modelling on advertised rather than achieved rent. Idealista's "monthly rental price" reflects asking prices, not paid prices, and the gap between the two is not published for this market by anyone — including us. Treat the portal figure as a ceiling, model your own void period and negotiation, and test whether the case still works at the bottom of your range.
Modelling occupancy from hotel benchmarks. Hotel occupancy of 70%+ is not transferable to a villa let: the seasons are sharper, the booking window is longer and a single unit has no inventory to average across. No annualised villa occupancy series is published for this coast, so the honest model is your own — week by week, priced by season, with the winter assumed empty until a booking says otherwise.