El Pais recently described Spains coastline as resembling Concrete Cemeteries.
One example being bounced around is that of the Montecid development in Alicante.The sales office is temporarily closed and a shop selling telephone, internet and television services has gone bankrupt.
“It is going very badly, they’ve built 450 to 500 villas of the 2,000 planned,” said Nacho, manager of a local restaurant-bar, The Oasis of Montecid”.
Spain is now full of overgrown half empty/built developments and Urbs, even the ones that were full are now showing signs of neglect as tourist are not visiting in the numbers they once were.
Many busy Urbanisations have SE Vende signs on them.
The crisis in the sector is far from reaching its lowest point. At the end of 2008, Spain had 997,000 empty properties, half of them on the Mediterranean coast.
A study published in June by the BBVA bank said this had risen to 1.2 million, in a country of 46 million, and had yet to reach its peak.
It forecast house prices in Spain, Europe’s fifth-largest economy, will fall by nearly 30 percent between 2008 and 2011 before they start to recover from the collapse of the decade-long property boom in 2008.
“Customers are not buying, believing that prices have not yet hit bottom, which prolongs the crisis,” said Ramon Martin of the Grupo Masa real estate firm in the town of Santa Pola.
Some promoters, who have borrowed from banks, are selling off cheaply, he said. “They don’t make any profit, they just stop paying interest.”
Others have gone bust.
Some promotors are offering reductions of up to 20%, selling not at a loss, but also not at a profit.
One facture also effecting Spanish buyers is the need to pay 30% of the askin price as a deposit to secure the property, many have done this and been then unable to finance the sale.
This has led to many prospective buyers lookin elsewhere, as sales in other Med countries haven`t been as badly effected as Spain.
Yes there are some good deals, but do you really want to be the only person on an overgrown site of 400 villas.
