The number of Brits buying euros for property purchases has increased in the last few days after sterling reached a rate of €1.15 for the first time since August 2008.

Foreign currency brokers have seen a 40% increase in clients buying euros, while new enquiries have shot up by 24%.

“A number of our clients in the market for euros are taking advantage of the improved exchange rate and buying their euros for overseas mortgage payments, property purchases etc now,” World First’s head of private clients, Elisabeth Dobson, told OPP.

“They are delighted to be getting a rate that is up to 12% better than the lows we have seen over the last 17 months. There are a number of clients who will have been holding off on property purchases and overseas investments due to sterling’s weakness against the euro. This rate move will certainly spur people on.”

A run of economic good news from the UK, including a fall in unemployment, rising inflation and an anticipation that the country is out of recession, has helped increase the pound’s strength. Meanwhile, economic problems in Spain and Greece have weakened consumer confidence in the euro.

Not all currency brokers have seen a substantial increase in business. “€1.15 is a bit of psychological barrier but most clients are still waiting for the magic €1.20 number,” Marc Morley-Freer, commercial director at Moneycorp, told OPP. “After the UK election we could see improvements that could push people to make lifestyle purchases – things are too uncertain before then.”

World First’s chief economist Jeremy Cook remains bullish following sterling’s 9% growth over the last year. “I don’t think this run in particular will last because it has happened so quickly, but the pound could be up to around €1.22 by the end of the year,” he told OPP.

Story from OPP

Tags: buying property in Spain, European economy, Recovery, Spanish economy
Posted in Financial & Mortgages | 1 Comment »

Once a star performer in Europe’s 11-year old monetary union, Spain has become the wayward laggard. Growth data last week showed the Spanish economy – hit badly by a property market collapse and soaring unemployment – stuck firmly in recession in the third quarter, while the eurozone as a whole grew 0.4 per cent. The rollercoaster ride might suggest the European Central Bank would have difficulty calibrating policy steps to suit Spain and the other 15 eurozone countries.

During the economic crisis, Miguel Fernández Ordóñez, Spain’s central bank governor since 2006, has rarely given interviews. Talking to the Financial Times in the library of the bank’s plush Madrid headquarters, he strikes a distinctly cautious tone, but his messages are not so different from those of his colleagues in Frankfurt.

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank last year, the ECB cut its main interest rate farther and faster than ever before, to a record low of 1 per cent. He hints this monetary policy stance will remain for some time. “It is clear that any increase in [interest] rates is off the screen. The markets do not expect any change before the second half of next year,” he says.

He agrees, however, that with financial markets normalising, the ECB’s governing council should plan to remove emergency support, such as offers of unlimited liquidity for up to one year. “My reasoning is that those measures were exceptional because the markets did not work well. When the markets are working well, we should take them away because otherwise the markets will never work perfectly, ever. Support should be exceptional.”

Jean-Claude Trichet, the ECB’s president, indicated this month that the “exit strategy” would start in December, with the ending of one-year liquidity offers.

But is Spain ready for the start of such an ECB strategy, given its weak growth prospects? “Well, it’s ready for recovery,” Mr Fernández Ordóñez replies, “because recovery in Europe is the best news for Spain.” Some 70 per cent of Spain’s exports go to the eurozone, he points out. His biggest concern is that Spain pushes harder to bring public finances under control and increase labour market flexibility.

From one perspective, eurozone membership acts as a straitjacket in a downturn because devaluation is not an option. Worse, the euro is strengthening. Mr Fernández Ordóñez does not see things that way, however. “Of course you are right that we cannot devalue, and what does it mean? This means that we have to do more structural reforms so that you have the advantages [similar to those] of devaluing.”

As such, he is happy to see Spanish consumer prices falling faster than elsewhere. “Deflation in the euro area would be a disaster. But if you don’t have deflation in the euro area and we have a negative inflation differential in Spain compared with the rest of the eurozone, that would be the best thing. Reducing prices and regaining competitiveness is what we have to do.”

Story from FT.com

Tags: ECB, European economy, financial crisis, Interest Rates, Recovery, Spanish economy
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I recently read an interesting interview with Mikel Echavarren, head of Irea, a Spanish real estate consultancy, talking about the state of the real estate sector in Spain. As an experienced professional in touch with many different companies in the sector it is worth listening to what he has to say. Here is a selection of comments from his Q&A with Idealista News, the news section of the property portal Idealista.

Do you think there are any good investment opportunities in Spanish real estate today?
I think so but they are risky. In three years we’ll probably be kicking ourselves for not advising investors to invest now. There aren’t many opportunities in commercial real estate because there isn’t much product and rents haven’t yet adjusted. In residential, on the other hand, the correction has been very strong and fast. The ideal profile now is an opportunistic investor buying properties off banks by taking on the existing debt, a type of real estate venture capital.

So you think there are opportunities in a residential sector because the adjustment has already taken place?
There are hundreds of thousands of possible transactions, but not many genuine opportunities. What there is not is any financing, so anyone who wants to take advantage of this market has to take the debt with the asset, but there are still very few people prepared to do that today.

Has the price of housing and land touched bottom?
House prices touched bottom some time ago, they have already fallen all they had to fall. And the price of land has fallen faster than house prices although it could even fall a bit more. We have been saying at the top of our lungs that the price statistics published by the government are worthless, and damaging to the sector because they give international analysts the impression we are a country of idiots. In the US and the UK prices have fallen around 20% from the peak whilst here we have only fallen by 8%. We work with close to 28 property companies that have been restructured, and you see that valuations are down 30% in 2 years, and then banks buy those assets with discounts of 10-15% off valuations.

Do you think there is any residential property that will never sell?
What there is is a stock of land that will never be sold, at least not in 10 years. There are areas of Spain where the town plans look like they were designed for an invasion of extraterrestrials, parts of Almeria, Murcia and Alicante. There is an overdose of land that will lie in the warehouses of banks for many years. On the other hand, the stock of finished property will be absorbed sooner.

Is there any real demand for housing at the moment?
Yes, quite a few homes are being sold. We would have to place it at more than 200,000 homes a year. What is not selling is off-plan, as there you take the risk of the developer or builder going bankrupt. It’s a good time to buy newly built homes with Euribor at 1.24%. They won’t be any cheaper next year. And when prices start to rise they will do so at a rate of 10% per year.

How does one get the Spanish property sector to recover?
The residential sector is already recovering, just not the developers, who won’t see the light at the end of the tunnel for three years; it is very bleak for them. Clients of ours tell us they have sold a lot this summer, and some banks tell us that they have had more mortgage requests this summer than in all 2009. Furthermore, we believe that developers have dropped their prices to the minimum. There is mortgage financing available, not much, but there wasn’t any at all in 2008, and now there is. Mortgage costs are low, and it appears that the future is not going to get any worse. The recovery is underway, although this won’t show up in the official statistics until the first half of 2010. As soon as there is a general perception that things are getting better, house prices will stop falling and start rising.

Story from Idealista News

Tags: buying property in Spain, Euribor, House prices, Interest Rates, Property market trends, Realistic House Prices, Recovery, Spanish property
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The market for new homes is on the road to a mild recovery, claims the G-14 group of Spain’s leading developers. Sales of newly built homes will continue “consolidating in the coming months” said Pedro Pérez, head of the G-14. Let’s hope this is not just wishful thinking by developers desperate for the market to start mopping up the glut of properties they created.

There is some basis for the developer’s optimism in the latest sales figures from the National Institute of Statistics. Sales of newly built properties increased by 7.6% from August to September, though on an annualised basis sales were down 20%.

“It’s been comforting to see sales rise for the 5th consecutive month, something that means we can say that the sector is recovering since it touched bottom in April,” Pérez told the Spanish press.

Sales are bouncing back thanks to lower prices and more selective mortgage lending by banks, argue the developers.

The recovery in sales will continue in the months ahead, says Pérez, in part because developers will make “every effort possible” to make prices more attractive.

Tags: Property market trends, Recovery, Spanish property
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The sharp housing correction that has sent Spain’s economy into a tailspin is bottoming out, Housing Minister Beatriz Corredor told parliament Wednesday.

“Recent indicators show a trend toward stabilization in the housing market,” Corredor said.

Spain’s once-buoyant housing market collapsed last year as the global financial crisis worsened a correction that was already underway after years of overbuilding and spiraling house prices.

Data Tuesday from Spain’s national statistics institute showed the number of houses sold in Spain rose 4.7% in July, their third consecutive month-on-month gain, though they were down 20% from July last year.

Falling housing prices and interest rates are helping to improve the affordability of housing, Corredor added, saying this should stimulate demand.

The government has offered incentives to convert unsold homes into rental properties or to sell them to qualified buyers in social-housing programs. It has also said it will limit current tax incentives on home purchases from 2011 in an attempt to bring forward decisions to buy.

In a note to investors Wednesday, Citigroup economist Giada Giani said the rise in July home sales points to an improvement in Spanish property demand, but noted that housing construction indicators continue to “decline sharply, depressed by the huge amount of unsold inventories.”

Story from Nasdaq

Tags: House prices, Interest Rates, Property market trends, Recovery
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UK based Almanzora Group says that there are signs that in some sectors the market is improving, after it announced that it has sold properties worth almost €5 million in the Almeria region of south-east Spain in the past three months.

‘Over the years, the property market in Spain has proved to be extremely cyclical, much more so than it is in the UK. This recent market activity suggests that the wheel is turning again, at least for the better quality, more individual, properties in new and progressive upwardly mobile locations,’ said sales and marketing manager, Simon Coaker.

‘Prices have been at their lowest for six years but are bound to start rising again if sales of such properties continue at this level. No matter how great the oversupply of poor quality, mass built apartments, in secondary locations around the old tourism centres, the actual supply of good quality individual properties in relatively new, less developed, locations which are the future of residential tourism in Spain remain in short supply,’ he added.

Tags: House prices, Property market trends, Recovery, Spanish property
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Spain’s economy is likely to have shrunk ’substantially’ less in the second quarter than in the first, though growth will remain negative to the end of the year, the economy secretary was quoted on Monday as saying.

‘We don’t have a precise estimate, but we believe that the fall (in gross domestic product) will be substantially less than in the first quarter,’ Jose Manuel Campa said in an interview with the financial daily Cinco Dias.

‘Until the end of the year we will continue to have negative growth rates, but increasingly smaller ones.’

Spain’s economy shrank 1.9 percent in the first quarter from a quarter earlier, its sharpest contraction in half a century – most acutely felt in the Spanish property market. Savings bank foundation FUNCAS said on Monday the worst may be over.

‘Available data point to a less abrupt contraction in the second quarter than the previous two quarters,’ Funcas said. Talk of economic recovery may be premature, the foundation said.

‘The worst may be over, but that doesn’t mean the economy will recover soon, just that the recession will be less intense,’ Funcas said.

The Spanish economy would shrink by 3.6 percent in 2009 and 0.6 percent in 2010, according to consensus figures published by the foundation on Monday.

The Spanish government has launched one of the world’s largest economic stimulus packages in relative terms which has inflated a ballooning public deficit likely to rise above 10 percent of GDP this year from 3.8 percent in 2008.

Campa reiterated the government’s target to cut the deficit to below 3 percent in 2012 in line with European Union recommendations.

‘It is our commitment to the European Union and we meet our commitments,’ he said. ‘Obviously, it is not easy, but it is feasible.’

Tags: financial crisis, Recovery, Spanish economy
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Results for the 2009 International Survey conducted by primelocation.com show that 70% of visitors to primelocation.com/international are actively looking to buy an overseas property, despite the current economic uncertainty.

Of all respondents, 28% said that they are unaffected by the current economic situation, 22% who had delayed their plans because of the economic climate are now back in the market and hope to find a bargain, while 10% said that they are checking out the market but will not proceed just yet.

Ann Wright, International Business Development Manager for primelocation.com, says ‘This is very clear indication that people have not let go of their dreams of owning a property abroad. Indeed, it is encouraging that people are coming back to the market, possibly because of recent press reports of falling property prices across Europe.’

The primelocation.com 2009 International Survey also monitored the countries the portal’s visitors are most interested in buying in. France took top spot with 25%, Spain came second (16%) and was followed by Italy and Portugal which tied in fourth place with 11% each. The United States, Cyprus, Greece, Switzerland, Turkey, Canada and the UAE took the rest of the top 10 spots.

‘It is interesting to note that over a quarter of all respondents currently own/rent a property in France and interest in the country, which has always been the first choice amongst Brits, has remained fairly stable at 25% since 2008. Spanish property and Portuguese properties have increased in popularity since 2008 as people respond to the reports of falling property prices.’

Tags: buying property in Spain, financial crisis, Recovery
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An article in ‘El Mundo’, one of Spain’s leading news papers, suggests there may be signs of recovery in the Spanish property market, in one of the first positive articles on the outlook for the market since the crisis began.

“It appears to be the beginning of the end of the worst period for property sales since the crisis began,” says the article. Pointing to encouraging signs that real estate markets may have bottomed out in the US, the UK, and France, the article suggests that Spain may be part of the trend.

The optimism also comes from a new report by Gonzalo Bernardos, a property market expert and professor of economics at the University of Barcelona, who argues that Spanish property market will come back to life this year, after a dismal 2008.

“There are five key reasons for saying that there will be more home sales in 2009 than there were in 2008,” writes Bernardos in his report. “Interest rates are lower; house prices have fallen back to their 2003 levels; banks are lending more; investors are coming back; and many people who were thinking of renting have decided to buy.”

Demand for housing is tempered by the cost of mortgage borrowing. With interest rates declining, Bernardos expects sales to pick up. “There is a fundamental variable,” explains Bernardos. “People buy homes in response to mortgage costs, which have gone from rates of 6.25% in September to 3.25% today. We are talking, in general terms, of a fall in mortgage repayments of 40%.”

There is, however, a flaw in this argument, which the article in El Mundo does not pick up. Euribor – the base rate normally used to calculate mortgage rates in Spain – may have fallen rapidly to historic lows, but the average interest rate charged on new mortgages is actually rising, and credit terms getting tighter, making it more expensive for new borrowers to buy homes. Falling Spanish mortgage rates are only benefiting existing borrowers, who already have a home.

Another positive sign, says the article, is that housing starts picked up in the last quarter of 2008, rising by 7% compared to the previous quarter.

The recovery is already underway, suggests Bernardos, who says that, so far this year “sales have been between 25% and 40% higher than in the same period last year.”

So the market bottomed out in 2008, goes the argument, when house sales fell by 28.8% whilst property prices fell by 5.4%, all according to official figures. On the question of prices, Bernardos doesn’t believe the official figures. “The fall in prices hasn’t been less than 20%, and in some places much more,” says Bernardos.

Another real estate expert cited in the article says that sales rates at new developments have picked up significantly. “In many developments they have sold more in the first quarter of 2009 than in the whole of 2008,” he says, also arguing that “prices have already bottomed out.” “Banks didn’t know where the bottom was, now they do and they are giving 80% mortgages because they feel the market has bottomed out,” he goes on, whilst also warning that “nobody should expect bargains at 50% discounts. That’s not going to happen.”

Whilst Bernardos expects the market to return to life this year, that doesn’t mean he expects prices to start rising soon.

“Sales will start to rise in 2009, whilst prices will stop falling in most places by the end of 2010,” writes Bernardos in his report.

But if Bernardos is right, and prices continue to fall this year, that will encourage people to delay their purchase decision, and reduce the number of sales. The article does not pick any holes in his arguments.

And at no point does the article mention of the second home market, which operates differently to the primary housing market. Given the present state of the economy, with unemployment rising across Europe, it’s not hard to imagine that it may take a while longer for sales of holiday homes to pick up.

Story from Mark Stucklin

Tags: financial crisis, House prices, Recovery
Posted in Property market | No Comments »