Archives for September 2008
September 1st, 2008
Some Spanish banks and insurance companies are breaching consumer protection laws by stalling, or refusing to honour guarantees for off-plan stage payments, reports the Spanish daily ‘El Pais’. Bank guarantees are meant to protect the money of people who buy off plan or under construction, and are required by law. If ...
Continue reading Bank Guarantee Woe for Buyers
September 2nd, 2008
The president of the Andalucian government (Junta de Andalucia), Manuel Chaves, met with his deputies last week to announce a raft of measures designed to rescue the region’s economy, property sector and small business as a whole. Chaves revealed that his government has finalised a plan to provide failing businesses in ...
Continue reading Andalucia Offers Small Firms €10m to Survive
September 4th, 2008
Spanish house sales dropped steeply in June, deepening a property crisis that dates back to the start of the year and analysts say is likely to worsen in 2009. House sales dived 29.6 percent in June from a year earlier after a 34.3 percent drop in May, the Economy Ministry's National ...
Continue reading Inevitable Fall for Spanish Property
September 2nd, 2008
The August Spanish property news has been almost uniformly bad - as bad as the property news in the UK. Most commentators agree that the pain will continue well into 2009, so we should expect bad news to be the norm for a while yet. If you've been keeping an ...
Continue reading Treading Carefully with Off-plan Property in Spain
September 3rd, 2008
Spanish property group Colonial, which is struggling under huge debts, reported a €2.38bn (£1.9bn) first-half loss as the value of its assets tumbled. The net loss compared with a profit of €316m a year earlier, as Spain's decade-long property boom ended. Colonial has written down the value of assets, including €800m for ...
Continue reading Spanish Property Group Loses €2bn
September 5th, 2008
Fitch Ratings has downgraded six sets of Spanish mortgage securities issued by Banco Santander, heightening concerns that the damage from Spain’s property crash is spreading to the country’s strongest lenders. The loans were “sliced and diced” and packaged in an identical way to sub-prime mortgage bonds in the US, belying claims ...
Continue reading Concern Over Spanish Bank Securities
September 16th, 2008
The town hall of Bilbao is the most transparent in Spain in terms of its dealings with the public, the contracting services and its finances according to a study on the transparency of town halls (ITA) by an international organization called International Transparency. This organization used 80 indicators to analyze ...
Continue reading Transparency in Spain's Town Halls
September 4th, 2008
I'm as guilty as anyone of seeing the Spanish property market solely through the perspective of press articles. Unfortunately, most of the bad news seems to be factual and backed-up by reliable data, and most of the good news is, more often than not, just promotional fluff. However, this morning, ...
Continue reading A Different Perspective on Spanish Property
September 9th, 2008
In recent weeks I have been furiously deleting email after email from property companies hyping the latest thrilling investment opportunity. As you might expect, none of these opportunities are to be found in the blighted UK property market but increasingly further afield, in fact, as far as possible from these shores. The ...
Continue reading Foreign Property – A Flight From Reality?
September 8th, 2008
The downturn of economic activity in the eurozone has come as a surprise to many observers. The credit crisis appeared to be less severe in the eurozone than in the US and, apart from Spain and Ireland, none of the eurozone member countries experienced serious problems in the housing market. ...
Continue reading ECB Must End Euro's Wild Rise
