Spain Real Estate News

Property company Atisreal is to auction off 86 apartments in La Manga del Mar Menor in Murcia starting with discounted prices of 50%.

Prices are starting at just under €50,000 and there are one and two bedroom apartments with sea views available.

I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures.  We've been saying it for a while that if you spend some time looking around you can find some very well priced property available to buy.  We just bought a house a couple of months ago, even with the state of the current market, just because we got an excellent price.

If anyone has any more information about these auctions please leave a comment, it would be interesting to know what happens and at what prices the properties are picked up at.

I heard the other day that the large Spanish estate agency, Unicasa, has closed it's branch in Manilva.

Considering the focused mainly on the domestic market this really is a very bad sign if even the locals aren't buying.

Does anybody know of any other Unicasa branches that have closed recently?

An unemployed Spanish real estate agent is selling raffle tickets in a bid to get rid of his 320,000-euro (255-pound) apartment near Madrid because he is unable to keep up with his mortgage payments and cannot sell it.

Miguel Marina said he hopes to be able to pay off his mortgage, worth 80 percent of the value of his property, by selling 64,000 tickets at 5 euros each, promising his home as the single prize to the winner of a draw.

Read the whole story...

I saw this article published today which I thought summarised quite well the current state of the Spanish property market.  There are some neat little tips in the article too.



"The fiesta is over for Spanish property. Scandals, plunging prices and the rising euro have left millions of homes unsold and empty. James Coney reports on the end of Spain's property bubble."

Read more....

If you don't know about it Google has a rather unknown utility called Google Trends.  It shows the trends in Internet searches for given key phrases.

I always find it interesting to take a look and see what the trends are for property in Spain.

The blue line below represent the number of property searching for "property Spain" and just to compare the red line shows the trend for "rentals Spain".


I think this graph says it all really....

Most of us have been well aware of the developer San Jose applying for protection against it's creditors, but I haven't heard much from anyone about Grupo Idearco.

Here is a recent report from the BBC describing the current housing and real estate market in Spain

I was with a friend over the weekend who owns Hamilton Homes in Manilva.  He was at the International Festival at a stand for local businesses.

He was giving out some flyers for local properties and I was amazed at some of the bargains on offer:



These properties have selling prices similar to what they would have been 4 - 5 years ago!

Good time to buy?  Very possibly...

I read an interesting story today about a real estate company in Valencia stating in their literature that they were "In association with Telegraph".  It seems it was just a marketing ploy and there was no agreement with the Telegraph newspaper.  



It's amazing the lengths some people will go to.

You can read the whole article here.

Now, I wonder if anyone is using "In association with Eye on Spain"....hmm...

Last Thursday Pedro Solbes, the Spanish Finance Minister, said that although Spain's economy has slowed faster than anticipated, it is unlikely that it will lead to a recession in Spain.

After enjoying many years of a construction boom, Spain's growth slowed sharply in the first quarter of 2008 as the boom comes to an abrupt but not at all unexpected end.  

In April the Spanish government reduced it's economic growth forecast for 2008 to 2.3% and also reported a sharp increase in unemployment.  The previous forecast was 3.1%.

Over the past few years Spain has been the country in Europe creating the most jobs, more than 600,000 per year but the construction slow down means a lot of these jobs are now being lost.

One of the things that we always try to do here at Eye on Spain is give people a balanced view of the the property market here in Spain.  The Spanish property market has probably had it's best days over the past few years but it's no secret that the market is heading down a slippery slope.

We've seen developers such as San Jose seek court protection from it's creditors recently and we've heard that over half of all estate agents have closed down in the past couple of years.  And things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Is it all doom and gloom?  It is for those needing to sell up, but for those wanting to net a bargain it's a great time.

We'll be reporting the good and bad news and tell it like it is, as we've always done with all aspects of our site.

EOS Team