Spanish Secretary of State for Housing, Beatriz Corredor

A few months back, I engaged in some private mail with a poster called ‘Roots’ on the Spanish Property Insight forum. Roots has, along with another poster called ‘Keith110’, long been campaigning to bring to account the Spanish government, the Bank of Spain and any number of lawyers, estate agents, developers and well just everyone connected to the issues concerning abusive practice and abject failures, in relation to many Bank Guarantees given to British buyers that have not been honoured.

It is an enormous and disgraceful tragedy that people such as Roots and Keith110 have had to now dedicate so much of their personal time and lives to seek redress and action on the part of the Spanish government and in fact the whole real estate industry, over something that I’m sure started out for them as an exciting adventure into buying a home in Spain…

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Based on an analysis of our own business trends and my personal instincts – both of which have been tested in the Costa del Sol property market for some 22 years now – I can finally answer the oft-asked question, and state with certainty – probably long before you’ll hear it elsewhere – that we have now finally reached the ‘bottom of the market’ for Costa del Sol real estate.

How can I do this ahead of official government statistics or our economic guru journalists? Well, here are the facts of the matter…

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Various national Press and TV media have again asked VIVA to comment in the past few days about the Greek crisis and the Euro currency issue affecting our Spanish property market. There was no short reply, and we couldn’t spend hours talking to them all, so this was our considered and rather long written response.

Phew… What an incredible drama and what an unbelievably stressful time we have all been through since the whole Greek crisis began to unveil itself some 19 months ago and almost spin out of complete control in the past 19 days.

Incredible frustration we know…

In the past two months, within VIVA we have seen record numbers of viewings for our properties from clients all over Europe. We know from our business history, from our website traffic and from the overall downturn in Spanish property sales over the past 5 years that there is now a huge reservoir of people, who are our clients, that are now eager and wanting to make their move into the market and buy.

Everyone knows that prices have been brought down to levels that would have been thought impossible to see. Developers, Banks and Private Vendors who feel they now simply have to sell, have reduced their prices to do exactly that: Sell.

As a result of this, in the first part of October, continuing from a really successful summer, VIVA saw its best sales performance in the past 5 years with properties being sold every single day.

Then coming to the boil, the Greek crisis that has been ever present like the elephant in the room for the past year and half, came crunching to our and everyone else’s door, and for a moment, or 19 days, almost slammed it shut. We then sold a property every four days instead of daily… Continue Reading

Well, I’m hardly going to ignore a headline in the British press like this one really.

It is part of a process that’s building and after many years of highly negative press, it seems inescapable to most now, that well, what goes around comes around and our day is perhaps here once more.

Along with other articles I’m blogging about though, it does sometimes pose the question: Is this a good or a bad thing?

Well it’s not me asking the question. This time it’s Citywire and Linton Chiswick reporting on what they say is rare good news for Spanish property owners.

So I’m not going to stop them. Lots of stats here, and comments about good value, plus firm buy investment, and views on how the market can only fall so far. Continue Reading

Well, jeeze, it’s nice to see the British press reporting some good news, but it isn’t really just for British homeowners, where it applies then it’s very good news for everyone.

The Telegraph reported recently that there was to be an amnesty for ‘illegally’ built homes under a new regional government initiative in Andalucía, in this reported instance relating to 11,000 homes in the Axarquía region. Continue Reading

'Resident' VIVA Blog authors Carolyn Mowlem, Martina Heynemann & Chris McCarthy

Hello, and welcome to our brand new blog. We’re thrilled to bits with its cool and funky design, and over the weeks, as we gradually populate it with all manner of useful, topical, informative and entertaining Costa del Sol stuff, we hope you’re going to become well and truly addicted! Take a look around…

OK, so it’s not the first time that VIVA has ventured into the realms of the Blogosphere, that was back in 2009. To be honest, we never did much like the look and feel of the ‘one size fits all’ blog template that we bought off the peg, and we were pretty much novices when it came to posting, too. But that was then! Continue Reading