Spanish Property News Review
January 27th, 2009
A few of this week’s news stories offered a welcome break from the regular “credit crisis” theme normally available. In the story about Fractional Ownership, it seems like the time may have come for this particular model of property investment – if they can successfully convince buyers that it’s not the same thing as Time Share, and if the industry can figure out how to sell it effectively.
The pitch is pretty simple. Why buy 100% of a property when you only use it a fraction of the time? Why not buy the fraction of the property that you will use – and benefit from the capital investment and appreciation of that fraction. In the foreseeable credit-limited future, reducing the capital outlay for a property investment seems like a step in the right direction to me.
I’m grateful to Property Pulse reader, Stuart McGregor-Lovell, who pointed out the flip-side of the argument presented in this article about Capital Gains Tax. He rightly highlighted the good news about having a CGT liability in the UK: There had been a capital gain in the first place.
Stuart put some example figures together which resulted in this article entitled: Spanish Silver Lining to Sliding Sterling. Certainly, the window of opportunity created by the Sterling / Euro exchange rate is something those selling Spanish property need to take very seriously – while it lasts.
I found the article about EasyJet interesting because the AENA passenger figures quoted tally quite closely with the language preference of visitors we see at Kyero.com. I’d be willing to bet that foreign owners of Spanish property would also break down by similar percentages.
- English: (UK, Ireland, USA) 47%
- German: 28%
- Italian: 12%
- French: (France, Morocco) 12%
Conspicuous by their absence are visitors to Spain from the Scandinavian countries, the Dutch and the Russian – nationalities which we know are active property buyers in Spain. Presumably, their numbers are fragmented according to originating airports, and are therefore buried deep in the AENA data.
Finally, the point made in the story about Property brokers, CBRE is that Spanish property sells when the price is right. Admittedly, they mostly handle commercial properties – but if anything, that market is even more hard-nosed than the residential property market in Spain.
Martin Dell, Kyero.com
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