Updated october 24, 2011:

• Spain had one of the most extreme housing bubbles in the world, and its banking system still is heavily exposed to the property sector. Spanish authorities realized that without support the banking system would likely collapse, and they have intervened with guarantees and a plan to help banks sort out bad loans and recapitalize. In the end we believe in a Pyrrhic victory, with most Cajas becoming zombies and recovery being weak and delayed as Spanish sovereign debt continues to rise sharply.

• Since the Real Estate in Spain busted, 150,000 Spanish building companies went bankrupt and 5,000,000 people lost their jobs in the building sector.

• Today it appears that neither the Real Estate Brokers, nor Real Estate agents, nor many speculators UNDERSTAND the catastrophy they market is heading for. Eventually shit hits the fan when you sell a 1,000 sq. ft dwelling for $ 300,000 !
• Most Real Estate brokers and agents in Spain try to make soem fast and eazy money and service and reliablility is not the rule to the day. Hence this market must be approached with extreme caution.
• Many buildings, houses have been built illegal and it can take up to 10 years to get a title delivered. On many occassions properties have been sold twice....
• In Southern Spain during the Euro conversion many prices were simply multiplied by a factor 4 !
• The legal system in Spain is absolutely unreliable and in many cases also corrupt.
  

Updated May 25, 2010 -  Empty properties have become a problem for residents trying to find the funds to pay for the maintenance of their communal areas

Developers owe communities millions in fees for unsold homes but the IDIOTS refuse to bring down the prices and the same can be said of the Landlords which refuse to bring down the Rents!?

click on the thumbnails to enlarge
Marbella-main street	Puerto Banus

Posted March 28, 2010 - Amazing is that what was published  last year year was and still is valid...

The Spanish real estate bubble keeps deflating and 'the Nile - denial' is the longest river on earth.

While Real Estate prices keep coming down properties are still sold and bought as markets never come to a standstill. The amount of empty homes keeps rising as fewer British (Spain's major customers) can afford to travel and live in Spain (the British Pound lost 30% of its value) and East Europeans have decided to return home and stay there. The Spanish cost of living keeps rising and chokes the economy as Spanish people traditionally have a tendency to go back to Peseta prices. Because of the depression, real income is stalling and government income fails to cover its expenditures. VAT and other taxes are raised instead of brought down...

March 2010 the second shoe has dropped: commercial Real Estate. Shopping centers have become ghost towns ( this even applies to Puerto Banus -Marbella). So far only the 'too big to fail' have survived. Most Real Estate (Immobilaria) shops have closed down and the state of the Spanish real estate has suffered from 3 months of rain.

Hard to understand is that Real Estate prices and rents are not really coming down as expected. Contrary to what is happening in the USA -where prices are coming down in compensation of a falling demand - Spanish people seem to be stubborn and prefer to leave the properties vacant instead of selling or renting them out at lower prices. Such is only possible for so long!

Posted September 1st, 2009

Spanish politicians and international investors have grossly misjudged Spain. In retrospect Spain will be viewed as subprime where all of the banking results looked good, until they didn't. This is typical of bubbles, and Spain will be no different. [Casey]

The real estate crash in Spain is worse than is widely believed and the Spanish banks are hiding the losses. Spanish banks are incorrectly seen as the strongest in Europe...they are only better at window dressing and making smoke curtains. Spain is a disaster waiting to happen. Denial or misunderstanding the crisis will prove to be costly to investors and Spanish home owners.

Spain has as many unsold homes as the whole of the USA has! In 2000 the exposure of Spanish banks (mainly) to the Real Estate sector was of € 33 bn. In 2008 it had increased to € 300 or a rise of 800%. Adding construction sector debts the figure amounts to €470 bn or half of the Gross Domestic Product of Spain.

Spain has over 1,000,000 of unsold homes. And most homes are on the wrong places (on the coast). According to official statistics (which are highly cooked), Spanish house prices are down a little more than 10% from their peaks. In reality, they are down A LOT MORE. Spanish banks are hiding their problems by cooking their books, by not marking loans to market, by lending to zombie companies and by making 40 year and 100% loan-to-value loans.

In many cases the Spanish banks just took over failing developments for the price of the mortgage hereby converting a non-performing mortgage into a property asset. Such was and is even the case with single family homes which are - ex post - simply rented out to the failing owner. As Spanish banks control most of the real estate appraisals, such was/is a simple operation.

Spanish banks are now the largest real estate owners in Spain and hence, Spanish Real Estate is the greatest risk for Spanish banks.

The Euro has become Spanish number one enemy. In order to solve the problem, Spain must either increase dramatically its productivity (something simply impossible) or reduce the wages by at least 30% (unemployment is over 20%). However a devaluation of the Spanish Peseta by 30% like Britain did with the Pound is simply impossible as long as Spain stays within the EU.

Posted March 16, 2009

A 100 sq meter [1,000 sq. ft] dwelling can hardly be called an apartment!? Promoters on the Costa del Sol sold 100 m² dwellings as Apartments for over € 100,000 and assisted the buyers to get a mortgage (even knowing they would never be able to afford it). Penthouses of 150 m² or 1,500 sq.ft were sold for almost € 1,000,000 (and sometimes more)...Construction plans called for preinstalled satellite TV and internet when nothing was done. Such a policy calls for a severe correction as many tourists have fled this area and prices keep on crashing.

Posted November 24, 2008

A four bedroom apartment for as little as € 10,000 : Spain and especially the Costa del Sol counts massive foreclosures. Banks have so far tried to jump in and they have taken over the property from the failing owner renting it back to him. As the treasury situation of Spanish banks is already heavily weighted with Real Estate, they are slowly moving into a situation where they have no other choice but to offload the surplus at well-below-market prices.

Posted November 5, 2008

Registered unemployed allowed to delay making half their mortgage payments.

Up to 500,000 unemployed people - 15,000 of them in the province of Malaga - will be able to delay making 50 per cent of their mortgage payments for two years. That was part of the package of measures to confront the credit crisis announced yesterday by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in a news conference at Moncloa Palace. Other measures include benefits of 1,500 euros for employers who take on the registered unemployed with family responsibilities.

Posted October 1st, 2008

There is a drop of 46% in house building and 27% less sales activity in Andalusia. The sales figure doesn't include the sales of new homes.  The president of the Asprimana (APCE) warned the fall of the property market could get even worse in the near future.

Posted October 1st, 2008

The latest information we are receiving out of the Costa del Sol is extremely negative. Businesses are closing down by the dozen each week. Banks and Developers are sliding in the ultimate faze of denial. Brace for massive bankruptcies.

Posted September 23, 2008

Conditions in Spain are deteriorating each day.  The Costa del Sol is especially affected. The Holiday season has been dramatically bad and one has to expect further bankruptcies of building promoters in the near future.

Posted July 16, 2008

Spain is now spiraling into the worst crisis since the Franco dictatorship. "The economy is in dire straits," said Dominic Bryant, Spain expert at BNP Paribas.". Some of the house builders are going to go bust, it is as simple as that. Over 10pc of Spain's economy has been building houses. This compares with 6pc-7pc in the US at the height of the bubble. The adjustment will be enormous," he said.

Spanish Economy Minister Pedro Solbes Wednesday defended the government's decision not to help troubled property group Martinsa-Fadesa, insisting it was up to the private sector to solve its own problems. "I am not particularly in favour of the public sector resolving the problems of the private sector," he told Punto Radio. "It is difficult to justify because it means using citizens' taxes... The risk must be supported by the shareholders." Martinsa-Fadesa filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday, becoming the first major casualty of Spain's once-booming housing market crisis. The news shook the Madrid stock market, which fears other property and construction companies could also fail.

Martinsa-Fadesa, a leading property group in Spain, said that despite many attempts it had been unable to obtain a loan of 150 million euros (239 million dollars) needed as the basis for refinancing. On Friday, the group had requested an extra delay to raise the loan as part of a plan to refinance debt of 4.0 billion euros. Its creditors said they had already put aside more than 600 million euros against their exposure to Martinsa.

The low interest rates that followed Spain's accession to the eurozone in 1999 fuelled the housing boom as Spaniards took out mortgages to buy homes for the first time or to trade up to a larger house. The market began to suffer early last year as rising interest rates and the international lending crunch hit Spain's credit-fuelled expansion, making it hard to sell property in a market that many argue is oversupplied.  AFP News

Posted July 12. 2008

Apartment owners lower prices for fear of being unable to rent during the summer.

Estate agents say that an apartment facing the beach can now be rented for 30 % less. Last August's occupancy rate was 81%. this year is expected to be 71% !

Holiday apartments are the latest consumer items whose prices have dropped as a result of the current recession. The two-month high tourism season is already upon us and reservation levels are far down on last year and rental prices have dropped considerably. Failure to cut prices means an unoccupied apartment throughout the summer season, and this is particularly disturbing for those who purchased these apartments as investments. Property agencies specializing in this type of rental have confirmed that summer prices have dropped by up to 30 per cent.

The president of the School of Property Agents, Cayetano Rengel, knows all about it, and also confirms that the sector is going through hard times. “The market is at stagnation point. Everything has stopped, from hotel reservations to private apartment rentals,” he says. In previous years, he recalls, most owners had clients for the entire summer by mid June.

The domino effect has set in, and to attempt to get around it, Rengel says that owners are lowering asking prices all around and are all very anxious to negotiate. “There was such demand some years ago that they could fix their own prices and stick to them, but now they are willing to talk about it to any potential clients, and even consider rental periods as short as three days at a time,” he adds.

The dozen or so estate agents who spoke to this newspaper agreed with the president of their association. “This will be one of the worst summers ever,” said one of them, while another assured us that prices have stagnated completely over recent months. Other agencies in the sector confirmed this.

CREDIT CRUNCH

Repossession cases heard by Marbella courts multiply eightfold in a year

 26.05.08 – 17:46 –M.J. CRUZADO | MARBELLA

 If you want an idea of the economic situation of a town, pay a visit to the local courthouse. The less money people have, the more conflicts are taken before the judges. In the last year the number of cases of unpaid mortgages presented to the Marbella courts has multiplied by eight.

“This is a symptom that all is not well because the mortgage is the last thing people stop paying”, says Alfredo Martínez of Ausbanc Consumo, the Association of Bank Service Users. According to statistics released by the Marbella courts, in the first three months of 2007, banks filed an average of one case a month; now this average has gone up to eight. Falling back on three or four mortgage repayment installments is enough for a bank to initiate legal action, which more often than not ends with the property being put up for auction.
 

Worst to come

“The worst is yet to come”, said Marbella’s head judge, Ángel Sánchez. “Claims for unpaid loans are increasing tremendously and all the banks predict that the situation will get worse in the second half of this year. Some professionals - lawyers, notaries, estate agents - lose trade in a crisis. Our workload increases. It’s maths”, Sánchez explains. If interest rates remain high (note that interest rates are low!) and unemployment, in the construction industry for example, continues to rise, there will be very serious problems in two years’ time. First people stopped paying other types of loans. Now they are in arrears with their mortgage repayments.

The majority of repossession cases in Marbella involve foreigners who bought properties as holiday homes or as an investment. Nevertheless there are some cases of families who have lost their only home after being unable to pay the mortgage or the community fees (I’ve seen community fees up to € 11,000 per annum), despite the flexibility measures introduced by the banks and the Government aim at reducing commissions to a minimum when it comes to main residences.

When a mortgage case goes through the courts the property is put up directly for auction, a golden opportunity for alert buyers ready to benefit from others’ misfortune.

The legal process is hindered however by notification problems. “It’s very difficult to find people in Marbella; there are a lot of isolated residential estates and villas, and holiday homes with foreign owners who don’t live in the town permanently. That makes our work a lot more difficult”, adds the judge.

At present the six Marbella courts have an average of 700 cases each which involve the repossession of property or other assets being frozen.

 Debtors in the community

 There have always been neighbours who will go out of their way to avoid paying their community fees. However in the last year the courts have noticed a considerable increase in cases brought against neighbours who could end up losing their home. Judge Ángel Sánchez explains that community fees “are among the first things that people stop paying” when times get tough, especially in Marbella where these bills tend to be high due to the large numbers of developments with pools and gardens.