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Did anyone see the Tonight programme on ITV at 7.30pm? I don’t have British telly here so I missed it.
http://www.itv.com/news/2013-10-03/tonight-bargains-in-the-sun/
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@mark wrote:
Did anyone see the Tonight programme on ITV at 7.30pm? I don’t have British telly here so I missed it.
http://www.itv.com/news/2013-10-03/tonight-bargains-in-the-sun/
Missed it too. Interesting quote on that webpage
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There have been changes recently to protect purchasers and there are still thousands if not hundreds of thousands of purchasers who have problems which have not been dealt with. You can’t always expect that it’s going to be a paradise – I don’t think paradises exist.”
– Gerard M Vazquez, Lawyer – Abogado, VAZQUEZ ESTUDIO JURIDICOChanges recently to protect purchasers….What are they…have I missed something 😮
You can’t always expect that it’s going to be a paradise – I don’t think paradises exist
Correct, but you at least expect to get a legal property in the developed world 🙄
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@mark wrote:
Did anyone see the Tonight programme on ITV at 7.30pm?
Hi Mark
Yes, I saw it. It was quite lightweight, glossed across a lot of issues and didn’t really say anything anyone on this forum wouldn’t already know. It was clearly a ‘dumbed down’ version for a British audience.
Was surprised to see your good self giving your expert opinion on the current situation. It was good though that the program producers actually made an effort to feature someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.
The overall advice seemed to be that now is as good a time as any to buy, to do your research thoroughly, choose your areas wisely, do your finances to see if it’s all affordable and if in doubt rent first to see how you like it. All sound advice that any sensible person would follow anyway. I just hope that anyone considering buying in Spain right now actually follows that advice and doesn’t get caught up in making rash buying decisions based on the perceived cheapness of property, when they can’t really afford the lifestyle.
I couldn’t help feel that despite the advice given on the program, it was encouraging people to buy in Spain now when many of them won’t be able to survive there in the current economy. For retirees it’s perfect, for anyone who needs to work it’s still a no-no. For holiday homes annual running costs and £ to € needs to be considered.
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This is what Mark Stucklin said on the programme:
“I would definitely buy today in Spain. I’m seeing some incredible opportunities and there’s a general feeling around that we’re at the bottom and that the worst is behind us, even though we’re not yet out of the woods.”
This comment by Mark is very bad advice. Here are the facts:
1) Many people who own property in Spain are desperately trying to get out of Spain and in many cases cannot sell their properties and are in serious negative equity;
2) The unemployment situation in Spain is at Great Depression levels with nearly 27% of people out of work and 50% of young people unable to find work;
3) There is alot of sleeze and corruption at all levels of the Spanish Government;
4) Buying a property in Spain is a legal minefield with crooked solicitors/lawyers, estate agents, town hall officials. At one moment your property is legal and then it is illegal when judged by a higher authority;
5) Spanish build quality is rubbish;
6) The bottom in house prices has not been reached and since the 2008 crisis house prices have dropped by 50% but need to fall alot further to give fair value given that house prices increased by 300% during the boom and will need to drop by at least 75% from the peak to return house prices back to sensible values;
7) The worst is far from being over as far as the Spanish economy is concerned. The recession in Spain will get alot worse particularly when the American Dollar collapses and the value of US treasury Bonds collapses in 2014 which will cause the interest on Spanish Government debt (bonds) to rise considerably. The UK help to buy housing ponzi scheme will send the UK property market over the edge and into the abyss soon after the 2015 General Election resulting in the mother of all UK property crashes and this will discourage UK buyers from buying property in Spain causing house prices in Spain to fall further;
8> Pound Sterling is still very weak against the Euro so anyone from the UK buying in Spain now will be making a big mistake.
9) Like greece, Spain will need further bailouts from the European Central Bank but eventually this ponzi scheme of the ECB buying Spanish Government debt to keep Spanish bond interest rates down will collapse and so it is certain that Spain will have to drop out of the Euro and revert to using the Peseta which will result in a 50% depreciation of the Spanish Peseta which means that property in Spain will halve overnight in relation to those people not using Spanish Pesetas. -
@jacobson wrote:
Here are the facts:
1) Many people who own property in Spain are desperately trying to get out of Spain and in many cases cannot sell their properties and are in serious negative equity;How does this contradict what Mark said? lower prices better for buyers
@jacobson wrote:
2) The unemployment situation in Spain is at Great Depression levels with nearly 27% of people out of work and 50% of young people unable to find work;
Please supply unemployment stats for spain during the early ’30s, I cannot find anything. Although this is VERY high unemployment in in the mid ’90 it was just shy of 20%.
@jacobson wrote:
3) There is alot of sleeze and corruption at all levels of the Spanish Government;
yes, but at least now these people are starting to be arrested/taken to court.
@jacobson wrote:
4) Buying a property in Spain is a legal minefield with crooked solicitors/lawyers, estate agents, town hall officials. At one moment your property is legal and then it is illegal when judged by a higher authority;
no. The higher authorities, are quite clear about what can be built where. They don’t just change their mind. The problem has been that certain municipalities have made some serious mistakes. Refer to 3)
@jacobson wrote:
5) Spanish build quality is rubbish;
Foolish generalisation.
@jacobson wrote:
6) The bottom in house prices has not been reached and since the 2008 crisis house prices have dropped by 50% but need to fall alot further to give fair value given that house prices increased by 300% during the boom and will need to drop by at least 75% from the peak to return house prices back to sensible values;
So you think property should be valued at 50% higher than they were just before the boom?
@jacobson wrote:
7) The worst is far from being over as far as the Spanish economy is concerned. The recession in Spain will get alot worse particularly when the American Dollar collapses and the value of US treasury Bonds collapses in 2014 which will cause the interest on Spanish Government debt (bonds) to rise considerably. The UK help to buy housing ponzi scheme will send the UK property market over the edge and into the abyss soon after the 2015 General Election resulting in the mother of all UK property crashes and this will discourage UK buyers from buying property in Spain causing house prices in Spain to fall further;
Your starting to sound like a previous poster on here…..
I like the ‘when’ not ‘if’ this happens.@jacobson wrote:
8> Pound Sterling is still very weak against the Euro so anyone from the UK buying in Spain now will be making a big mistake.
why should the pound increase against the euro? Would be a plus of course, but why should an economy the size of the UKs have such a strong currency compared to an economy the size of the UK?
@jacobson wrote:
9) Like greece, Spain will need further bailouts from the European Central Bank but eventually this ponzi scheme of the ECB buying Spanish Government debt to keep Spanish bond interest rates down will collapse and so it is certain that Spain will have to drop out of the Euro and revert to using the Peseta which will result in a 50% depreciation of the Spanish Peseta which means that property in Spain will halve overnight in relation to those people not using Spanish Pesetas.
But with the american default, will anyone be able to buy whether in pesetas or not?
You seem very sure of your predictions…
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No question of born loser. People read the market according to their knowledge, their’s or friends experiences of a particular sector, life experiences, level of prudence or a better return on their investment in an alternative product/services.
The short/long term predictions of even the most respected economist with access to economic models etc cannot predict with any accuracy in the short or long term.
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What a load of nonsense ! -the post by Jacobson -who the hell are you ? How can anyone predict that house prices in Spain are 75% over valued or that UK ones will crash or that the $ will crash ? I thinkit is thoroughly irresponsible to make such unsubstantiated speculative predictions that are no good or use to anyone ! If somebody wants a property in Spain has the money to buy it and can find somewhere they are happy to live in why spoil it.Homes are places to live in and enjoy not to be continually prattling on about what % they wil go up or down.In any case Spain has been told by the IMF it can ease up on austerity -th emphasis now is on growth and getting people back to work. The £ is not weak against the Euro -it is at a premium of about 15%. You can buy a lot of property out of one I southern England at the moment or have a lot of cash left over. Council tax is still very much cheaper than in UK and the cost of food and living can be much less if you are not extravagant
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Spain is about to enter a two-year period of elections in 2014 so you can expect there to be a slight pick-up in the economy in order to buy votes for the ruling political party but after the elections you can expect the Spanish economy to continue in its relentless slide to oblivion. You can see the levels of poverty that Spain has sunk to when you see the vast number of street beggars and prostitutes in Madrid. Madrid has brought in laws to fine beggars in the City 600 euros just for begging which is indicative that Spain has lost none of the Fascist police state powers of General Franco.
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My advice to anybody who wants to buy a property in Spain is to wait until the following four things to have occurred before buying a property in Spain;
1. Wait for a second banking crisis to occur in the United States that will be far worse than the banking crisis that occurred during the sub-prime crisis of 2008. This will result in the flow of money between the banks drying up on fears that banks will default and go bankrupt. This will inevitably occur when interest rates start to rise in the United States as a result of the depreciation in the value of the Dollar and rise in US treasury yields/interest rates. This is most likely to occur sometime in 2014. Even a small rise in interest rates will have a devastating impact because the debt level of the banks and the US Government debt is so large which will mean that they will have to implement severe austerity measures and cut backs in public spending to pay the interest on the debt.
2. Wait for the British economy and housing bubble to collapse soon after the General Election in 2015. The yields/interest on British Government debt/bonds will rise and the Bank of England will be forced to raise interest rates probably in 2014 but most likely soon after the 2015 General Election.
3. Wait for the value of the Pound against the Euro to rise to 1.5 euros to the pound which will occur when the Bank of England finally begins to raise interest rates sometime in 2014/2015.
4. Wait for the Spanish economy is decline further particularly when the yields on Spanish Government debt rises making it difficult for the Spanish Government to pay interest on the debt and they will have to default and drop out of the Euro.
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Your analysis is credible calpespain and anyone who dismisses it out of hand would be as dishonest as anyone who pretends that everything in the garden is lovely ! But as Katy rightly has said on a previous occasion this is not the right time to be spending a lot of money ‘hundreds of thousands’ on a property in Spain . That is my opinion too -but if you are thinking about a pied a terre 30-50000 euros to use for holidays or to over winter on a regular basis I don’t think you should let the uncertainties stop you providing you are not borrowing for it. .As events in America are currently .indicating there is a very distinct political and intellectual divide there over the ‘neo-Keynsian’ monetary policy that has recently been persued and the difficulty is unwinding what was done in those circumstances that it was used for -that raises the question whether it was correct in the first place. The economics of Keynes will stand or fall on this for sure with very serious implications. Now UK cannot operate as an island economy -we are affected by whatever happens globally because the international markets are all interlinked assets and securities internationally spread and owned. So I think it would be careless to expect that we would benefit by a general economic collapse of the type you are suggesting. So to suggest our £ will appreciate to 1.50 is something you can only surmise and indeed you cannot predict either what the value of sterling would be with a new pesetsa. It was a long time 164 to £1 in stable times but wten to more than 200 around the millennium. Having said -you must not dismiss the possibility that the US will pull together and find under the stewardship of Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve a gradual withdrawal from QE and Armageddon is averted-they have to because the Chinese are not going to accept this continuing. Spain is suffering from a property overhang that distorted its economy due to a credit bubble inflow from other countries including UK. I would say the chief concern that you might have with a property abroad is that your main income might be in sterling -pensions etc and thinking whether you can send or bring money to Spain if for example exchange controls were at any time imposed -that is a practical issue as I see it. Who wants to have cash stashed in a Spanish bank for them to charge Inheritance Tax on it ! But certainly think you need a reserve of some kind of cash or gold in Spain in a safer place if you intend to be habitually there.
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For many of us who have about 30-40 years of life left (if we are healthy and lucky), and for many of us who have seen many predictions about fiscal calamity (in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and now the 2010s), and for many of us who see that there are NO fiscal fundamentals anymore and the world now leaps from one fiscal bubble to the next fiscal bubble and that is the modern global economic model that nobody seems to want to ‘model’, now is the perfect time for buying a house in Spain (or anywhere) and living one’s life as one wishes, with some fiscal planning and discipline.
Anyone who believes dire predictions, anyone who believes that there are solid economies, anyone who believes that one can actually plan for every type of disaster, is a fool.
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You can buy a property now and in the process get ripped off because property in Spain is still overvalued or alternatively you can wait three years by which time house prices will have fallen anywhere between 50-75% from the values they are today. The choice of what you choose to do is really down to you but I would say that many people would be much better off waiting a few more years and buy a property at a sharply reduced price than to buy today at a stupid price.
The only people who are buying property in Spain now are those who have retired and cannot wait three years for house prices to fall to more sensible levels because they fear that they be dead in three years time or those people that are buying property in Spain now are drug dealers or money launderers who are trying to make clean their cash they made illegally and often without telling the taxman. No one should be under any illusion that buying a property in Spain now will be a big mistake that they will make in haste and will regret for many years later. At least wait before buying a property in Spain until the unemployment rate in Spain rises to 50% or wait until you can buy a two bedroom apartment in the Canary Islands for 10,000 Euros.
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@calpespain wrote:
You can buy a property now and in the process get ripped off because property in Spain is still overvalued or alternatively you can wait three years by which time house prices will have fallen anywhere between 50-75% from the values they are today.
In the history of the real estate industry, NOBODY has successfully predicted the market’s bottom – the supposed ‘best time’ to buy.
But I lack real estate industry expertise to know that the only people buying in Spain are retired drug dealers, wanting to ‘clean’ their cash, and only having 3 years left to live. Seems like a very narrow client base to me.
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@Fuengi wrote:
Come on Gary, admit it!
You’ve been selling drugs in the US and are now using your purchase to clean your ill gotten gains!
😆 😆 😆
What’s funny is that everyone was predicting that the real estate market in the San Francisco Bay Area would take decades to recover because we’re supposedly socialists and have too much regulation or something.
And for most of this year, most properties have been selling over asking price, getting multiple bids. It’s as if we are in a bubble once again.
So much for predictions.
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Big difference in the USA Gary compared to Spain, I once posted that Spain has something like a fifth of the US’s population but as many if not more properties for sale, so it comes down to supply and demand as well as property regulation issues, economy differences etc 🙄 We have friends in San Diego, property prices are back to pre-crisis levels, the infrastructure is much better IMO generally, the feel good factor and excitement is there in California, people appear to be earning good money and spending it too, same for many other US areas like Florida, New York State etc 😉
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Lets face it! At least the United States has a huge market economy compared to that of Spain and all that money printing by the Federal Reserve in the form of 85 billion dollars a month in Quantitative Easing that is being used to buy 40 billion dollars in mortgage backed securities and the other 40 billion to buy US treasury bonds is deliberately being done to blow up another housing bubble in the US but the Fed’s stimulus is creating a phoney illusion of economic recovery that is based on debasing the value of the dollar and the housing bubble that is being inflated is so full of holes that it won’t go very far before it collapses again when reality sinks in that the United States is in terrible economic decline.
Rising house prices in the US does not reflect the fact that the US is a “Zombie” economy that is on life-support in which the too-big-to fail banks are being propped up by low interest rates and cheap money from the Federal Reserve which is debasing the value of the dollar. In the US you are continuing to see the destruction of the American middle class, more cities going broke and ending up like Detroit and more high quality jobs disappearing only to be replaced by low paying part-time work serving fries at McDonald’s.
Besides you can argue that the recent rises in house prices in the US is either due to nominal house prices rising or the purchasing power of the dollar falling as a result of all the money printing and the reality is that rising real estate prices in the US is really due to the high inflation as a result of all the money printing by the Fed and is a sure sign that the dollar is losing its purchasing power and becoming a worthless currency.
Despite all the problems that the US has with its disfunctioning economy which is still in a state of collapse regardless of the recent rise in real estate prices the United States is still a huge economy with an enormous service and financial sector whereas in the case of Spain you need a scanning electron microscope to locate where Spain’s economy is located.
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@angie wrote:
Big difference in the USA Gary compared to Spain, I once posted that Spain has something like a fifth of the US’s population but as many if not more properties for sale, so it comes down to supply and demand as well as property regulation issues, economy differences etc 🙄 We have friends in San Diego, property prices are back to pre-crisis levels, the infrastructure is much better IMO generally, the feel good factor and excitement is there in California, people appear to be earning good money and spending it too, same for many other US areas like Florida, New York State etc 😉
I understand that, Angie. The purpose of my post was to provide an example of how predictions are bunk. Nobody predicted the the SF Bay Area real estate market was going to ‘bubble’ again so soon.
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Real estate prices in the US are rising not so much because house prices are actually rising but it is due to the purchasing power of the Dollar falling as a result of all the Quantitative Easing (Money Printing) and artificially low interest rates of the Federal Reserve. In other words, the US Dollar is less able to buy as much as did before and so rising real estate prices is a result of the debasement of the US Dollar rather than a reflection of an actual improvement in the fundamentals of the US economy which are truely dreadful with Obamacare (health care) costing a fortune to implement and all the red tape and bureaucracy and the ever increasing burden of state and federal taxes on businesses.
The author of the book “Currency Wars” James Rickards is about to publish a new book in April called “The Death of Money” in which he predicts the coming collapse of the international fiat paper monetary system.
Video: The United States has been in a Depression since 2008
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Jake, here is my response to you regarding Rickard from 2012:
America’s “bankruptcy” that is the conclusion of Peter Schiff, and Jim Rickards’ view of US currency is nothing more than fantasy. Schiff and Rickards belong to a class of authors/experts in the ‘the economy is going to fail industrial complex’. They profit from spreading doom and gloom. They are good analysts, but they both are blinded by their ideology which restricts their conclusions to only those that fit their ideology, not their analysis. And Rickards last book had so few sources cited for his assertions that it was nothing more than wild speculations . . .
If you believe that crap, why are you focused upon a forum about Spanish real estate? Shouldn’t you be in survivalist mode, planning for global calamity, stockpiling tins of meat and water? There are a lot of forums dedicated to that topic.
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@calpespain wrote:
The author of the book “Currency Wars” James Rickards is about to publish a new book in April called “The Death of Money” in which he predicts the coming collapse of the international fiat paper monetary system.
I personally do not have the back ground to be able to argue the gentlemans points, quite honestly. But I find it funny that a man who is predicting the impending collapse of our monetary systems is looking a selling this book. Might as well offer it for free online, as any money is makes is going to be part of the ‘international fiat paper monetary system’
@GarySFBCN wrote:
If you believe that crap, why are you focused upon a forum about Spanish real estate? Shouldn’t you be in survivalist mode, planning for global calamity, stockpiling tins of meat and water?
What every man needs to survive the coming calamity http://thechicspy.com/?p=19036
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@Fuengi wrote:
What every man needs to survive the coming calamity http://thechicspy.com/?p=19036
Thanks for the link. Using that site, I was able to locate a very-difficult-to-find $34,000 Alligator Back Pack, the perfect stylish accessory for the endtimes:
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People like Peter Schiff, James Rickards, Ron Paul, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Ned Goodman, Karen Hudes, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Bud Conrad, Doug Casey, James Turk, Greg Hunter, Max Keiser, Martin Weiss, Richard Duncan, Pastor Lindsey Williams, Kyle Bass, Michael Maloney, Robert Kiyosaki, Harry Dent all say the same thing. The US Dollar will collapse in value and the bond market will collapse and the United States is heading for economic collapse.
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@katy wrote:
Yeah, right 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆 😆
Go ahead and laugh. I’m beginning to believe Jake/calpe/elena and will be liquidating all of my US dollars and investing in feather pillows, in advance of the international feather pillow shortage. Money and real estate will have no value and those with pillows will be the new 1%. 😀
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I am sure that by 2015 unemployment in Spain will reach 50%, Spain’s national debt will be over one trillion Euros, with a debt representing 120% of the country’s GDP and you will be able to buy a three bedroom house in Fuengirola for 20,000 euros.
Currently the property website rightmove is listing 22,165 properties for sale in Spain. By 2015 I expect that figure to rise to 60,000.
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