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It is now several years since the property bubble burst and it has taken several other sectors with it, resulting in situations that would have been unthinkable years ago. One of these is the Golf Hills Village development which is only 95 per cent completed, but which has now been put to auction. It is the first time in Spain that this has occurred with an unfinished development, but the situation is not as exceptional as it may seem. Since the year 2000 golf hills village - Unfinished Development in Estepona Goes Up for AuctionBNP Paribas Real Estate, which is handling the transaction, has carried out 148 auctions involving 11,800 properties and a figure of more than 500 million euros. The auction will have a reserve price of 7.3 million euros and those interested will have to make sealed bids for amounts higher than this in front of a notary. The bids will be opened on March 18th and the highest bidder will be able to take over the apartments and sell them on, or make whatever use of them they may wish.

The owner of the development is the Midamarta company, which is part of Caja Castilla la Mancha. This company began to acquire properties from the bank but they were transferred to the Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos de Entidades de Crédito (FGC) after the Bank of Spain intervened in the savings bank, towards the cost of the 1,300 million euros that had been used to save it.
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British expats, as well as German and Russian buyers, are helping Spain's property market out of the doldrums, with a lot of interest in luxury developments in Majorca.

3574676 1201682 foto25039528 300x199 - Balearics Property Market Grow Thanks to Foreign BuyersSpain's property market is showing more green shoots of recovery, with the country's House Price Index reporting the smallest decline in prices since the end of 2010, according to the National Institute of Statistics.

House prices still fell overall - but Majorca bucks the trend, reporting property price rises of 4.8 per cent in the third quarter of last year, compared with the same period of 2012, according to the Spanish development ministry.

Three other regions reported prices rises in the House Price Index - Navarra, with growth of 2.8 per cent, Extremadura, up 2.2 per cent and Madrid, up 0.3 per cent. However, these figures fall far short of Majorca's growth, which estate agents say is boosted by foreign buyers, particularly those with a substantial sum to spend.
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Spain’s Constitutional Court has suspended - provisionally - the law passed by the Junta de Andalucía in October to prevent families with limited financial resources being evicted from their homes.

46353 1251686 foto 1 300x225 - Andalucía’s Anti-eviction Law Suspended by CourtThe law, described as a measure to ensure the social function of a property, allowed the authority to temporarily expropriate the use of a property repossessed by a bank so that its original owners could still live in it.

The Constitutional Court has admitted the central government appeal against the law designed by the Junta de Andalucía to ease home evictions by temporarily expropriating the use of houses seized by banks and allowing their owners to continue living in them.

The Andalusian law was passed on October 1st and revoked a previous decree on the same matter which had been passed in April and was also the subject of an appeal on grounds of it being unconstitutional.
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Just a day after Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said that the housing market was beginning to touch bottom in a recovery that is gathering pace, the National Statistics Institute (INE) on Tuesday announced that home sales plunged in November of last year to their second-lowest level since the crisis began around the start of 2008.

46353 1245080 foto 1 300x200 - Bad news for home sales in Spain, despite the fall in pricesThe INE said housing transactions in the month shrank by 15.7 percent to 21,847, a figure only above that of April 2012, which coincided with that year’s Easter holidays and therefore had fewer working days.

Despite an accumulated fall in prices since the highs set in 2007 of around 40 percent after a decade-long boom that suddenly burst, house sales have fallen for the last seven straight months. In the first 11 months of last year, home sales dropped 2.1 percent.

Demand is being restrained by a jobless rate of just under 26 percent and by falling wages as Spain strives to restore its competitiveness and export its way out of the crisis. Banks have also tightened lending conditions.
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Ángeles Muñoz, Mayor of Marbella, has announced that the controversial plans to build skyscrapers in the town will not go ahead, and the debate about them is over. She did not say whether the modification of the town plan which was recently approved as a first step towards building the tower blocks would be debated again by the council with a view to annulling it.

46353 1240990 foto 7 300x225 - The debate is over: no skyscrapers in Marbella (Málaga)Backtracking on her previous statement to the effect that no decision would be made until a public board had been convened and consulted, and in the face of strong opposition, the mayor said that it would not be necessary to wait for January and the advice of the yet-to-be-created board, because the decision had been taken.

In the mayor’s opinion, this means an end to the debate about the project for skyscrapers. Asked about the creation in Marbella of a citizen platform made up of promoters, architects and ecologists who are opposed to the project, she said:

“Anybody can form a group and debate. If a platform is set up we will be delighted to hear its opinions, but on the part of the local government I am telling you there is no intention to go ahead,” (in reference to the skyscrapers).
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