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Property sales expected to increase in Spain in 2013

SpainHouses.netDecember 31, 2012December 31, 2012Leave a comment

The last quarter of 2012 saw a positive end to the year with a flurry of British and other international buyers taking advantage of falling prices and a reduced VAT rate on new properties in Spain.

The higher end of the market also seems to have performed well and at the lower end of the market what are regarded as bargain prices are attracting buyers, especially those with cash as getting a mortgage in Spain is not easy.

Mortgage tax relief has been abolished and VAT on new homes goes up to 10% on 01 January. The temporary reduction of VAT to 4% has boosted the number of overseas buyers.

Foreign buyers have tended to dominate the market in 2012, mainly Belgian, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and a welcome resurgence of more British buyers over the last three months.
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Chinese are drawn to Málaga by new promise of residency for buyers

SpainHouses.netDecember 24, 2012December 23, 2012Leave a comment

At the moment it’s nothing more than a declaration of intention by the government.

Nevertheless, since the announcement of the plan, three weeks ago, to give residency to non-EU foreigners who buy a home in Spain for more than 160,000 euros, the stagnant property market on the Costa del Sol has started to move a little.

With around 15,000 new homes without buyers, a national property market paralysed by the crisis and Europe on a go-slow, estate agents see this new measure as their last chance to offload stock and to get things moving again.
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Spanish House Prices Keep Falling 2

SpainHouses.netDecember 17, 2012December 16, 20122 Comments

Spanish house prices fell by the most in the third quarter of this year since a massive property bubble burst around the start of 2008, according to figures released Friday by the National Statistics Institute (INE).

The INE said prices declined 15.2 percent in the period July-September from a year earlier after declining 14.4 percent in the previous three months. Prices have now fallen for the past 18 quarters, with the pace of the falls accelerating over the past year. Prices in the third quarter of last year were down 7.4 percent, eased 11.2 percent the following quarter and dropped 12.6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

The average price of existing homes declined an annual 16.4 percent, while the price of new homes dropped 13.6 percent. Prices fell in all of the Spanish regions, with the biggest fall experienced by Madrid where they declined 17.9 percent, followed by Asturias where they dropped 17.5 percent.

Home sales have picked up in the past few months in anticipation of an increase in the value-added tax rate on new housing to 10 percent from four percent at the start of next year, when the government will also remove tax breaks for mortgage payments on the main home.

However, demand for housing remains conditioned by an unemployment rate of over 25 percent and by tight credit.

Via: elpais.com

Spain to give legal residence to non-EU property buyers 1

SpainHouses.netDecember 10, 2012December 10, 20121 Comment

There’s no such thing as an illegal immigrant with money. At least not in Spain thanks to the Government’s new strategy to revive the real estate market. The proposal is to change the immigration law to grant legal residence to non-EU citizens who buy a property in Spain for more than 160,000 euros.

Secretary of State for Commerce Jaime García-Legaz announced the project on Monday although later Prime Minister Rajoy stressed that as yet “no decision had been taken”.
There was an immediate response from other political parties, unions and immigrants’ associations, who described the plans as “strange” and “implausible”.

García-Legaz explained that the reform process would be set in motion within a few weeks and that he considered the 160,000 threshold to be “balanced” with respect to the government’s objectives.
“We can’t establish a lower price limit, because that would generate a massive demand for residence permits using a property as an excuse to get one,” he stressed.
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Property Sales in Málaga Province Increase in September

SpainHouses.netDecember 3, 2012December 2, 2012Leave a comment

In September, the last month analyzed by the ‘Instituto Nacional de Estadística’ (national institute for statistics), 1287 properties were sold in Malaga province, according to a report issued earlier this week.

While this figure is fractionally smaller than at the same time last year (by a mere 11 sales), Malaga has seen twice as many properties sold as in Aragón and as many as in Galicia, Castile and Leon and Castile and La Mancha put together. The province has the most house sales in the whole of Andalucía and is only overtaken nationwide by those in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Alicante.

This positive figure, when added to the growth in sales of the previous two months compared to the same time last year, is a great relief in the current harsh economic climate.

One of the deciding factors involved in buying a property this year, apart from falling prices, is the fact that next year tax relief on mortgages is to be removed. Additionally VAT is set to rise significantly in January, from four per cent up to 10 per cent.
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Foreign nationals taking advantage of falling costs are descending on the ‘costas’

SpainHouses.netNovember 26, 2012March 31, 2020Leave a comment

All is not lost: they say that the end of the property crisis is coming from the East, where Spain offers sunny weather, good services, excellent communications and now, cheap housing too. This has become a land of opportunity for a certain type of foreign client with money in their pockets. Mortgage loans may have dried out, but that does not matter; these customers pay in cash.

The Mediterranean region is producing a new model of real estate opportunity: the two-bedroom apartment for 60,000 euros. This is what some banks had been trying to avoid for a long time: demolition prices. But there it is. Reality has moved faster than the government and its bad bank project.

There are two ways of looking at life in the real estate sector. Looking out from the top, on the 19th floor of Madrid's Torre Picasso, the workplace of investment fund consultants, the situation is viewed with a cold, cautious eye: "In the short term, the bad bank will act like the casting-out-nines technique. Things will never be the same," says Rafael Roldán, an executive at Ernst & Young. Or, in other words, big capital has yet to make a move.
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Feng Shui Used To Attract Asian Buyers to Spain

SpainHouses.netNovember 19, 2012April 2, 2020Leave a comment

A Spanish developer has come up with a novel way of increasing property sales by building a new project with Chinese style buildings aimed specifically at Asian buyers.

Grupo MAIN has unveiled its development of 22 homes in Fuenlabrada, an industrial suburb 17 miles south of Madrid, that is built in a Chinese style courtyard with pavilion, ponds and an entrance gate topped with a roof reminiscent of a Far Eastern temple.

‘The Chinese have a saying; crisis is synonymous with opportunity. We’re building for the Chinese because they are a very wealthy community in Spain and the rest of the world,’ explained Jose Parra, chief executive of the Spanish developer.

His company believes that expat Chinese will want to buy the homes designed using feng shui, a system designed to maximise positive energy flow. It has been known for Chinese buyers to reject a property on the advice of feng shui practitioners.
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The Illegal Homes of Chiclana, Cadiz, Spain

SpainHouses.netNovember 12, 2012November 12, 2012Leave a comment

There is a town in the province of Cádiz (Spain) where nearly half of the nearly 80,000 residents live in illegal homes. Even the city planning councilor lives in one of them.

This town is Chiclana, and it is trapped in a legal limbo that has forced it to return to a planning regulation dating from 1987 because the courts canceled all its later zoning plans and it cannot grant any new first occupancy licenses, a legal requirement in Spain.

Marisol Ayala, the local chief of city planning, got the post after creating a political party representing residents of these illegal homes. The party's program included a request for amnesty for their homes, fine reductions and a chance to rejoin legality at a minimum cost.

Nobody knows how it all began, or who took the first step. Chiclana progressively grew while authorities turned their eyes away from the fact that walls were going up on rural land, flood zones and protected areas. Within the walls, homes were built. And people came to live in these homes.
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Spain sinks deeper into recession in third quarter

SpainHouses.netNovember 5, 2012February 20, 2017Leave a comment

The Spanish economy shrank by 0.3pc between July and September, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of contraction.

Spain is buckling under the pressure of a large deficit and a property crash that has left its banks struggling under a mountain of bad loans.

Swingeing spending cuts and tax rises have stifled investment and have left consumers without the money or the will to spend.

The third-quarter data from Spain’s national statistics office was a first estimate of GDP with no detailed breakdown. Despite the decline, it reflected a slightly better performance than the 0.4pc fall in GDP economists had predicted.

However, economists said the figure was likely to have been flattered by consumers bringing forward purchases to beat the VAT rise in September, partly veiling a weak consumer backdrop.

“Domestic demand likely contracted sharply again, despite some spending being pulled forward ahead of the VAT hike,” said Greg Fuzesi, economist at JP Morgan. “Our forecast anticipates an intensification of the Spanish recession at the turn of the year.”
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Banco Santander earnings hit by real estate provisions 1

SpainHouses.netOctober 29, 2012February 20, 20171 Comment

Banco Santander’s net profit in the first nine months of the year plunged 66 percent from the same period a year earlier to 1.804 billion euros, as Spain’s leading bank stepped up provisions for its exposure to the ailing domestic real estate sector.

Santander said Thursday that in compliance with government decrees issued in February and May of this year it had charged a net 3.476 billion euros against earnings for potential losses from real estate assets, 90 percent of the requirements dictated by the decrees.

The bank said it had reduced its exposure to the real estate sector from 42.5 billion euros at the end of 2008 to 26.5 billion as of the end of September.

Spain has been granted a loan of up to 100 billion euros to clean up the balance sheets of its banks because of their exposure to the property sector, which went into a tailspin around the start of 2008 after a giddy decade-long boom. The government is setting up a bad bank to absorb up to 90 billion euros in toxic assets from the country’s banks, mainly related to the real estate sector.
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