Dubai desert property meltdown

Property meltdown in the desert is looking likely following the news that two ambitious Dubai projects, announced with much fanfare only a few months ago, are reportedly on hold.

The Nakheel Tower and Jumeira Garden are apparently the victims of the growing unease in the Dubai market, which has not, after all their talking-up been immune to the global slowdown.

Even by Dubai standards, both projects aspired to set new standards for decadence and grandiosity, the Tower at 1 km high, the world’s tallest building. The plans were greeted with a certain amount of scepticism, given the world market conditions, given that 1,000s of other extravagances have already been given the axe.

There is unease also from buyers in danger of loosing their deposits as mini sheiks pull the plug on current projects – no money back guarantees in this hot spot - and, losing loads in currency transactions because the Dubai currency is linked to the US dollar.

Conversely, 1.4 million British users of Google have voted Spain as their favourite property hotspot – twice as many as France, and can’t remember where Dubai and Bulgaria etc were in the table – and it’s not hard to see why.

Brits and other north Europeans have been sunning themselves in Spain for generations, so grans can identify with attributes such as the culture and cuisine, their kids are familiar with the easy, low cost of getting there and the grandkids appreciate the sandy beaches, and child-friendly approach of locals.

Something for everybody then, and with property prices at similar levels as five years ago, there are bargains to be grabbed, with none of the risks of the so-called emerging markets, such as Dubai and Bulgaria etc.

Unlike, Britain and other countries there are still good mortgages to be had for Spanish bargain property, with one firm, www.propertyinspain.net guaranteeing up to 80% on selected Spanish bank repossessions they actually list on their website at discounts up to 50%.

No wonder 1,000s of Brits are heading to Spain. They say they are tiring of the McBroon fiscal follies sending the country down the tube, while doing little to combat crime, binge drinking, drug abuse, pornography, teenage pregnancies and benefits lifestyle.

They plan to buy a bargain property as a summer-long or full-time escape from Busted Britain both a useful escape from the daily routine of corporate losses, bad news and uncertain future. Who can argue with that?

Spanish homes attract bargain hunters

There is still plenty of interest in prime Spanish property as savvy buyers eye up the bargains along the Costas that are on offer from banks, must sell developers and hard-pressed private vendors. Sales of 1,000 homes a day are still being recorded by Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE).

Sales peaked in 2007 at an astonishing 600,000 sales a year, more than France, Germany and the UK combined and have declined since then due to over supply and the international credit crunch. Currently, sales are running at around one third less than the regular 50,000 a month.

The latest activity levels in Spain’s housing market fell by 37% in November 2008, compared to the corresponding month in 2007, according to according to INE. Figures show that 32,792 residential properties were sold in November, down from 51,753 a year ago. On a year to date basis, 11 months to September, sales are down by 33% for the country as a whole, compared to the same period last year.

In the most popular areas like Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol and the Balearics the falls are greater, probably due to developers resisting big price reductions, a stand that is expected to collapse this year as funding banks put the pressure on to sell off the homes started 18 months ago and now nearing completion.

With 1,000 sales a day the Spanish property market is clearly still offering good value for local and international buyers and there are still low cost mortgages available to British and other overseas buyers. Prices are back to the levels of nearly five years ago and there are bargains due to Spanish bank repossessions or because of developers’ new dash for cash as their development loans become due.

The best deals are within 800 metres inland of the Costa Blanca beaches, where a heady mix of key ready completions (with extra spec and incentives) and prime site resales (fully furnished with appliances and established neighbourhoods) can be snapped up at prices 50 percent below current valuations.

This coastal strip is attractive with sandy beaches and ranged behind are bars, restaurants, shopping and public open spaces that are the essentials of holiday and full-time living. Specialists like www.propertyinspain.net have 1,000s of properties in these areas which they define as “beachside” because the beach is the biggest influence on the location and asking prices. There are also bargains in “golfside” locations, with rentability almost as good as “beachside” apartments.

Bargain hunters are registering daily with the website and they receive useful advice and fact sheets on how to secure the bargains, some of which come with guaranteed 80% mortgages because of their excellent loan to value ratios.
Some Spanish banks are offering interest rates to Brits planning to buy in Spain and saving up for their deposits a generous 5.40% interest on three month deposits.

Dodgy TV show, dodgy deals

That’s television for you…the repeats are coming round faster and faster. Three months ago we had the unedifying sight of Prime Minister Brown and Chancellor Darling putting on a double act for the cameras, while trying to explain why they were handing over 37 million quid to bail out busted banks.

Today, viewers again saw the pair – visibly older, due to sleepless nights considering their fiscal foul-ups? – looking like Tweedle B and Tweedle D, apparently repeating the process as their efforts had failed first time around. This time they plan to throw ten times the amount of billions of taxpayers money at banks who are busted due to their irresponsible lending and fat cat lifestyles.

They told astonished, assembled media folk they didn’t know the final figure for this repeat bank bail-out because they didn’t have all the data on the toxic debts concealed by the banks. Tweedle B trotted out his infamous “We’ll do what ever it takes to solve this crisis” while alongside, Tweedle D spouted: “We are doing this for British families and to restore credit lines to British firms”.

“British families” are losing their homes and “British firms” are going bust every day, some even as the Tweedle B and Tweedle D Show hogged the airwaves.

Most viewing Brits would be in despair at such a pathetic performance, some would seriously ponder their future prospects under a leadership that allowed the banks to squander the deposits of, and profits made from, British families and businesses and then blame the US sub prime market for the recession.

The British Government allowed regulated British banks to stuff billions into such dodgy deals, so surely that’s how it started?

Meanwhile, over in sunny Spain, with the country teetering on the brink of recession, the leftist government has predicted unemployment may jump to 15.9% this year, compared with 11.33% registered during the third quarter of 2008.

In an interview published in El Pais yesterday, Finance Minister Pedro Solbes said the country had used up "all the public spending margin we have in tackling the economic crisis.” At least Spain had useful reserves, without calling on taxpayers to cough up for failing banks.

But there is good news for Brits in Spain and those planning to buy a property with the passing of Law 4/2008 confirming that Spanish Wealth Tax was finally abolished. Until now, non-residents have been required to present Form 214, the so-called "wealth tax return". The official name of this Form 214 is "Impuesto sobre el Patrimonio y sobre la Renta de No Residentes" ("Wealth and Income Tax Return for Non-Residents").

Following approval of this law, those non-resident individuals who have one or more properties in Spain are no longer required to pay Wealth Tax. However, while they are still required to pay the Income Tax for Non-Residents, tax handed over by Brits can be offset against UK income tax

Further good news for savers, specialist banks liked CAM in Spain are now offering non residents 5.40% interest on three month deposits – a much better deal than UK banks and ideal for would be buyers saving-up for their deposits.

Haunted words on Busted Britain

If ever ill chosen words come back to haunt you, consider Gordon Brown’s thresh against political rivals when he promised the Labour Party annual conference at Brighton in September 2000 there would be “No return to Tory boom and bust”

For the record, this is what he boasted: “We can today steer a course of stability at a time of uncertainty in the world economy without putting growth at risk.

“So we will not return to the old short-termism. There will be no sudden lurches in tax or spending policy.

“And there will be no irresponsible pre-election sprees or pay demands that put youth jobs or any jobs at risk. No change in our policy on Europe, support in principle for the single currency, in practise the five tests that have to be met. And no relaxing our fiscal rules.

“We will not put hard won economic stability at risk. No return to short-termism. No return to Tory boom and bust”, he added.

He’s has clearly broken every promise in the last few months and it’s showing in the opinion polls, despite government promises to spend our way out of the recession.

So, what’s happening now with Great Britain Limited, as the McBroon Government borrowing tops the £50 billion of the last Tory Government and they lurch around like “headless chickens” in an attempt to save the economy and their jobs. Gordon Brown has broken every fiscal rule in his own book and oversees a country busted in spirit and busted in kind.

The debts he’s run up could take several generations of punitive taxes to pay off as a forecast 3.1 million people lose their jobs and, for many breadwinners, the homes they have struggled to maintain.

For many Brits this is decision time: Do we stay or do we go? Grab the redundancy money while it’s on the table or take early retirement if that’s on offer or plan to do better in your own business by moving it to Spain?

Benidorm or Puerto Banus, for many businesses, could be in the Home Counties so far as the internet is concerned and reaching London doesn’t take much longer.

The Med lifestyle is a great improvement on over-crowded, over-governed Britain. If braving it out in Britain is not an option, think about Spain, where it costs 30% less for a better lifestyle, what’s left of your pension can be collected from a local bank or post office, and The Sun and Sky Sports are freely available within a totally relaxed way of living – and you might even live longer.

Cost of property purchase and running it are halved in Spain and there’s always a swimming pool or beach just a stroll away as well as a whole new country and culture to explore...

Battered Brits move to Spain

The daily battering of Britain continues with 1,000s of job losses and every economic barometer shooting downwards on an almost daily basis. Lowest house sales, fewest mortgages handed out, house prices down 8%, record job losses and lowest production etc.

Not surprisingly, our wine drinking is up, taking the UK to the dubious title of leading wine importer in the world.

Waitrose customers now provide another useful state of the nation indicator. The South Woodford emporium of the upmarket supermarket chain offers three charity bins for customers to pass on their sales tokens gained at the check-outs. A charity specialising in anxiety and phobias is getting twice the amount of the rivals’ bins…

Clearly a connection between increased wine quoffing, the thousands of finance sector staff being fired and a mass anxiety over the future of Great Britain Limited. Bankers may well have superceded journalists as the traditional big drinkers of wine and it is workers in the finance sector who are in High Anxiety. They are important customers for Waitrose and contributing to the anxiety charity…

Over in Spain, the sun is shining, there is less anxiety and the number of people seeking a new life in the country has surged by 12% as Brits firmly established themselves as the country's fourth-largest immigrant community. Figures just released by the Spanish government revealed that the number of British expatriates registered as resident in Spain had risen to 352,000 at the start of 2008.

That gave Spain a bigger British population than all but eight local authorities in England, according to the most recent census figures. Strangely, the UK Government, seen as inept with statistics generally, reckons there are around one million Brits in Spain.

Although the new figures were gathered before the tumbling value of the pound began creating problems for those living off British pensions in Spain, few pundits expect numbers to start falling. Emigrants to Spain are no longer mainly pensioners. The figures show only one third of Britons living in Spain are aged over 55.

So with thousands of repossessed bargains from the Spanish banks and Must Sell developers, we can expect the figures to continue rise. Paying around half of the current valuation more than compensates for the decline in sterling against the euro - and how good is it, to have an property asset in the world’s strongest currency?

www.PropertyInSpain.Net are the Google top ranked source for Spanish bank repossessions, offering bargains across Spain direct from the banks.

A wobble for Spanish property

It’s a New Year and a new marketplace for the Spanish property sector, as the bargain hunters for Costa villas and apartments gather like UK High Street shoppers prowling for closure sales and colossal discounts…

With developers and builders going down all over Spain and estate agents shutting up shop on a daily basis, 2008 was clearly the worst year ever for the property business in Spain.

The economic crisis buffeting in Spain sent the number of bankruptcies soaring by 182% to 2,864 in 2008, 38% of them in the real estate sector, reveals a new report from Pricewaterhouse Coopers. “Between October and December there were more insolvency proceedings than in all of 2007,” says the report, which warns that the commercial courts could collapse under the workload if this trend continues in 2009.

Bankruptcies amongst developers and brokers rose from 74 in 2007 to 387 in 2008, and in the construction sector from 182 to 692. The rapidly rising number of property companies being forced into administration, like Martinsa-Fadesa, is likely to have a significant impact on the market.

There is even more bad news - the number of Spanish properties bought and sold in October (39,201) was 27.5% less than the same time last year, according to the latest figures from the Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE). In the first 10 months of the year, sales are down by 28.4% compared to last year.

That means that the Spanish property market has shrunk by almost 30% in a year. Instead of producing 600,000 homes a year, it’s now doing 400,000 – still more than the UK, Germany and France combined.

So, maybe, more of a wobble than a disaster? A viewed now shared by many buyers in Northern European countries where growing recession, ineffectual Government action and uncertain futures are combining to focus on grabbing some of the property bargains available in Spain.

While new build prices are falling 6.6%, the biggest ever recorded, according to Sociedad de Tasación, one of Spain’s leading appraisal companies, there are plenty of homes – key ready with 10 year guarantees and resales with appliances and furniture – that can be snapped up at prices 30-50% below their current valuations.

It seems that enough is enough for many families and retirees in the UK and other colder climes and they are now clamouring for the big discounts in the warm, welcoming Costas.They Google search for “Spanish bank repossessions” and “Half-price property in Spain” or even “Must sell Spanish homes” and they find the top ranked source for exactly this kind of property.

It’s PropertyInSpain.Net, a long established website with a good affiliate network on the ground to help registered buyers find the best deals. They have 1,000s of bargains and an online showcase of properties to tempt the discount hunters. Just as important, the banks are prepared to lend up to 80% of the price, given the unprecedented loan to value ratios.

Massive discounts, generous low cost mortgages, cheap flights to a still low-cost country from a high-cost, chaotic homeland threatened with burgeoning tax bills for decades, is a bit of a no-brainer for the 250 families a week registering for Spanish bargains…