Tuesday, January 12, 2010

2010 Spanish property market outlook

New Year - fresh dawn of optimism on the Spanish property front? I have posted on Spanish property prices a couple of times mainly to update readers on my downbeat August article "Ten Reasons Why Spanish Property Prices Will Stay Depressed". The ten reasons basically hold but I was hoping for some reasons for cheer by now. Perhaps some sign of prices stabilising with Euro interest rates set to remain low and economic recovery elsewhere in Europe under way.

Instead the New Year has bought bad news with a depressing ring of familiarity to it. First up we have news that several more British owned properties in Almeria are to be demolished as they are illegal builds. The attendant publicity in The Telegraph, Sun, Mail etc could hardly be a worse start to 2010 for those charged with persuading Brits that buying Spanish property is safe. "Happy New Year - We're Going to Bulldoze your homes" was the Mail headline.


Secondly came headlines about a tidal wave of repossessions and banks dumping their property portfolios onto the market as a result of changes to accounting rules. The respected website spanishpropertyinsight has the full story:


Where does this leave us? With many of my 10 reasons why property prices will remain depressed still in place (particularly the surplus of properties on the market and sterling weakness) 2010 doesn't look to clever. BBVA said in December they expected a further 12% fall in 2010 - worse than the 9% seen in 2009. Let's hope things are better than that.

3 comments:

  1. Agree totally with your views on the Spanish Property market, however, one thing I have noticed since the turn of the year, is that the oversees property companies have started again to advertise their exhibition venues, primarily targeting Turkey, Southern Italy and Spain.

    The one thing I hope does not happen in Spain, is that when the economy does start to improve, they don't start mass building again. There must be enough vacant properties in Spain to satisfy the demand for many years to come.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good location is also play an important role while investing in a property. When you plan to buy or rent a property,

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree with BMV Properties, that location matter for this purpose....

    ReplyDelete

 
OctoFinder Blog and ping http://www.feeds4all.nl Spanish Insight - Blogged