Kyero Q1 2010 House Price Index Released
April 2nd, 2010
The Kyero Spanish house price index has just been updated to reflect the most recent asking prices of every property advertised on Kyero.com. Download it by clicking the image below (1MB pdf).
Properties where the freehold is not for sale are excluded. This excludes rentals, leasehold properties and fractional ownership properties.
Properties where the number of bedrooms entered is unreliable are also excluded – as are properties with unusually high or low prices. The Kyero index uses a median calculation which is more representative of a group of prices than is the more common mean calculation.
Overall, the average asking price of a Spanish property hasn’t moved much at all – which indicates that asking prices are not an accurate reflection of actual transaction prices. The well-publicised drop of 30-40% on property prices since 2007 has not been reflected in the prices that owners are asking.
Putting yourself in their position, you’d probably reason that it’s better to keep the ‘sticker’ price high and haggle hard when a buyer makes an offer. The problem with this logic is that many buyers are put off by what appears to be an unreliably high asking price. Most will never get as far as making an offer at all.
The trick, in my opinion, is to completely ignore the asking price – and make a cheeky offer. What’s the worst that can happen? If you make a habit of it, you may be fortunate enough to secure a home valued at over €800,000 for around €395,000 – as actually happened last week, and was related to me by the estate agent involved in the deal.
This clearly happened because the vendor was ‘motivated’ to sell – but also because the buyer ignored the initial asking price. I don’t know how many times the buyer had had their low offers rejected by other vendors – but I guess they just kept going until someone accepted. After all, they probably only wanted to buy one house 
Martin Dell, Kyero.com
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