Buying a home in Palma requires the highest initial investment in the entire country. According to a study by the real estate portal Idealista, a family needs approximately €147,116 in savings to finance an apartment in the Balearic capital. This figure places Palma at the top of Spanish capital cities in terms of the initial savings required to buy a home, ahead of cities like San Sebastián (€137,700), Madrid (€117,793), and Barcelona (€103,172).

To afford a down payment on an apartment in the Balearic Islands, a young person would need to save their entire salary for seven years. This is the result of applying housing prices in the Islands to the average youth salary calculated by the Youth Council's Emancipation Observatory, which barely exceeds the minimum interprofessional wage of around €16,500 per year. Given this situation, having the minimum €60,000 needed for the down payment and closing costs of buying a property is practically an unattainable dream and becomes an insurmountable obstacle. "Right now, with the salaries in the Islands, it's impossible for a large part of the population, young or old, to have any savings capacity. So, if you can't save a portion of your income, no matter how many years go by, you won't be able to cover the expenses involved in buying a home, and you'll be completely out of the running," he explains. "We have two problems that, combined, are terrifying: a very high price per square meter and very low wages. Added together, these two factors create a barrier that very few families can overcome," he concludes.

The average mortgage amount in Spain for home purchases has risen in a decade, from just over €100,000 to nearly €170,000 between August 2015 and the same month this year, an increase of almost 63%. In the Balearic Islands, the increase has reached 70%. The archipelago is the fourth region with the largest increase, behind Madrid (95%), Andalusia (77%), and the Valencian Community (74%). According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), in August 2015 the average mortgage amount for home purchases was €104,318, compared to €169,650 in August of this year, the most recent month for which data is available. This average increase of 63% falls slightly short of the overall rise in housing prices this decade, a period in which the price per square meter has increased from €1,524 to €2,679, representing a difference of nearly 76%.

Buying a home in the Balearic Islands has become a nearly impossible mission for those under 35, who need an average of 29.5 years of saving to gather the money needed to access a mortgage, according to a study by the mortgage comparison site yAhorro.

Rationalize the biggest purchase of a person's life. This is the maxim of a personal shopper real estate, a fairly unknown professional profile that has a single objective: to defend the interests of the buyer. One of them, Jordi Clotet, co-founder of Nexitum, publishes The 7 doors to buying your home and getting it right, having visited more than 15,000 apartments throughout his career and participated in 6,000 sales. Here's some of the advice he gives.