Open Frontiers Named a Winner — European Property Awards 2026–2027
Open Frontiers European Property Awards success continues: we’ve just been named winner in the “Best Real Estate Agency (Single Office)” category for Spain at the 2026–2027 edition. We’ve been sitting on this since the phone call, and we are not sorry about how excited we are.
A Recognition That Means Something
The European Property Awards, part of the International Property Awards programme, are judged by an independent panel of property and built-environment professionals from across the industry. Entries are assessed on the standard of the work itself — design, marketing, customer service — not on sales volume. That’s exactly why this one means something to us: it’s a judgment on how we work, not just how much of it we’ve done.
Three Decades in Real Estate
Ben Buyl founded Open Frontiers in 1996, and the way we work hasn’t really changed since: know the area better than anyone, treat every client like the only one, and let the results speak. What has changed is the paperwork behind it — our Director of Sales, Innin Buyl, holds the agency’s API licence (COAPI no. 438) and the GIPE accreditation, recognised by the European Association of Real Estate Professions (CEPI) at European level. We work across residential and commercial property throughout Sotogrande and the wider San Roque municipality, in a market where most of the value is still in knowing the streets, the sellers and the paperwork better than a portal listing ever could.
Not Our First, and It Never Gets Old
This is our third time winning this category, having also taken it in 2024–2025 and in 2023–2024, and Ben has separately been named Best Real Estate Agent Spain in 2022–2023 and 2023–2024. We’d love to say we’re used to it by now. We’re not. Every single time feels exactly as good as the first.
What Goes Into an Entry Like This
What people don’t always see is the work behind an entry like this — months on end pulling together everything that makes a year’s work worth judging: how we’ve handled listings, how clients were looked after, what set the work apart. Putting an entry together forces us to look at our own year with the same scrutiny the judges will apply, and that alone tends to be a useful exercise, win or lose.
It’s judged the same way the wider market should judge any agency — not by what we say about ourselves, but by what’s actually been done. We take it seriously every single time, and every single time, hearing the result gets us just as excited as it did the first year we entered. This year’s result will be confirmed at the Awards ceremony in London, and we genuinely cannot wait to be there.
What This Means for You
If you’re buying, selling or investing in Sotogrande or San Roque, this is an independent panel telling you what our clients already know — that the work behind the transaction is done properly, from licensing to local knowledge to how a deal actually gets handled. It’s the difference between an agency that promotes itself and one whose work has actually been checked against a set standard, by people whose job is to be sceptical about exactly that kind of claim. That’s not something we can put a number on, but apparently someone else just tried to.
Thank You
None of this happens without the people who trust us with something as big as buying, selling or investing into a home — so thank you. If you’re thinking about property in Sotogrande or San Roque, now’s a great time to say hello.
