Discounted Spanish Properties – Part 3
August 31st, 2010
Our programmers pulled out all the stops, and I’m delighted to announce that our new discounted property features are now live.
- When searching for property, check the box that says Discounted. You’ll find property results with a minimum discount of 10%. You can also sort them by the most heavily discounted ones first.
- All discounted properties are highlighted to distinguish them in a mixed set of property results.
- When viewing a property, you can now see when it was first advertised on Kyero.com, what its previous price was, and the discount that the current price represents.
Give it a try – view discounted resale properties or discounted new build properties in Spain on Kyero.com
How does it work?
Since 2004, we’ve been taking regular snapshots of the price of every property advertised. Previously, we used this data to calculate our quarterly Spanish house price index.
Now, we use the same data to pinpoint the highest advertised price of each property and compare it to the current advertised price.
The difference is displayed as the current discount and prospective buyers can use it to locate genuine reductions on over 9,000 Spanish properties.
Does a discounted price mean that the property is a definite bargain? No.
Is a property which hasn’t been discounted definitely over-priced? No.
Is the asking price always closely related to the eventual transaction price? No.
These new discounted property features on Kyero.com are simply another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that prospective buyers must self-assemble when buying property in Spain.
In the absence of any reliable official data about actual property transaction prices in Spain, they offer prospective buyers more insight into the price history of properties advertised on Kyero.com.
They provide a level of transparency not previously possible, and they arm the buyer with more data with which to make an offer on a specific property.
I hope you find these new features useful – please let me know either way by leaving your comments.
Here’s this week’s hand-picked Spanish Property news. We scour thousands of news sources so you don’t have to.
Martin Dell, Kyero.com
Related Posts
- Spanish Property Bargains – Part 2
- Spanish Property Discounts Revealed
- Spanish Part-exchange deals launched
I wish this feature would have been available before. I think it’s useful.
Love it!
I’ve seen this being used back home in Ireland. Its impossable to keep up with changing prices. This idea solves that problem to an extent.
I especially like the idea that one can see how long the property has been on the market.
Thats a real eye-opener!!!
Hi Martin,
I live in Australia and am considering a change of lifestyle by moving to Spain. Been looking at property for last 12 months and your website is one of the ones I use. One suggestion, when your site lists properies, it would help if it also showed a small map of where in spain it is. I know you can click on “View” and then look at the map but my suggestion would mean you could quickly look down the page of all the properties and get an idea of whether the proprty is coastal or rural.
Cheers
Your site is simply outstanding for anyone considering a move to Spain and/or purchasing property. I am so grateful for the clarity of information as well as the articles. Many thanks.
Dear Martin,
I read about and noted Kyero’s new feature with interest as I consider Kyero to provide one of the best services within the property portal market and have been an advertiser on your site for many years. I know that you appreciate both positive and negative criticism, and are not afraid of a little controversy and with that in mind I would like to remind any readers of one of Benjamin Disraeli’s better known and oft repeated quotes “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This feature may be considered to fall into the third category. Statistics are of most use when applied to a broad spectrum and not when highlighting individual records.
I fully appreciate how any prospective purchaser may benefit from seeing how long a property has been on offer, as long as the information provided is accurate and in context, but I would be concerned that the system may be very open to misinterpretation and I suspect abuse if not handled very carefully and resourcefully by the Kyero Team. Such openness in the industry is to be applauded as long as the information is not relied upon in any way where it is easily manipulated either deliberately or unwittingly and where its limitations are very clearly explained. If the truth be told, it is not uncommon for an agent to bend the truth to his or her own ends, so it is questionable that information reliant upon their direct input can be trusted. Yes one can perhaps see from an honest agent how long a property has been offered for sale, but does that just make it easy for the dishonest or careless agent to benefit?
1. Most importantly, but by no means exclusively: How do you safeguard against an agent withdrawing a selection of his portfolio and subsequently reinstating it to generate new “first advertised” dates, and thus making a mockery of the information? A little database manipulation is really quite basic and I don’t even have experience in running a database driven property site.
2. Is there anything to prevent an agent from posting property at an inflated sum for a short period to simulate a discounted price rather like everyone suspects goes on with furniture retailers who seem to manage to continually have sales? This can happen just as easily by accident; take the example of a villa, advertised on your site at the time of this response, in Oliva, reduced by 50% from 500,000€ in May 2010, having been first advertised in “April 2010”. This is not a property that was ever advertised correctly for 500,000€, the highest sum I have seen for it previously is 250,000€ (at which time it was posted on our own site at 249,00€) and that was in January 2009 not April or May 2010. I am sure that the advertiser has not posted the inaccurate sum of 500,000 with any mal-intention, although, if he reads this and recognises his advert he should note that the pool in the photo actually belongs to the next door neighbour! If such glaring errors are to be avoided then perhaps much more care needs to be taken when collating the data.
3. The time the agent has been advertising on Kyero is not identified. One can therefore see that the information derived from the first advertised date is potentially misleading as it will never exceed the date on which the agent first contracted to Kyero? Perhaps this is the case in the example I gave above?
4. Are properties that have been put on hold treated as though they have been advertised since the first upload date or since the reinstatement date (relevant to properties withdrawn for letting and then returned)?
There are other questions of course, some perhaps of greater concern and many of lesser. Thus, to cut the long story short, when the knowledge of its limitations are very clearly outlined the feature may be considered to be a benefit, but I suspect not by all advertisers or vendors and indeed it should not be relied upon in any way by prospective purchasers. At present it can only be regarded as a distraction intended to afford a degree of transparency to which it does not accede. My recommendation is that it be removed until the data it provides can be reasonably relied upon or its limitations are very clearly explained.
Great and valid points Carl, thanks for posting. We do have safeguards and checks in place but none would prevent all the permutations of errors and manipulations that are possible. Perhaps a little info box – explaining the potential limitations of this data – close to the discounted information would be a good idea?