Tag Archives: property
Property sales and prices up in Spain in first half of 2016
Residential property sales in Spain increased by almost 20% in the first half of this year suggesting that the real estate market recovery is well underway. The latest figures from the General Council of Notaires shows that transactions were up by 19.6% in the first six months of 2016 to a total of 225,551 sales, and prices increased by 6.1% year on year. The data reveals that new home sales are not boosting the recovery and indeed falling. Sales of non-new homes increased by 19.29% year on year, accounting for 68.1% of all the homes sold but new homes sales fell 13.6%. This upward trend continued in June, when home sales grew by 7.1%, year on year, again driven by the transactions on second hand homes, which increased by 11.5% reaching a total of 29,052 units, while transactions on new housing registered a decline of 33.4%, with a total of just 2,751 sales. The price of an average home increased by 6.1% to €1,418 per square metre. But new homes cost more and this could explain why sales are falling. The average price of a new build was €1,886, some 12.7% more than second hand homes. The data also shows that in June some 44.7% of home sales were financed through a mortgage with the average capital loaned €128,480, a slight increase, of 0.4%, over last year. The cost of renting a home in Spain is also increasing, up by 2.4% in the second quarter of 2016 taking the average to €7.41 per square meter per month, according to figures from property portal Fotocasa. It means that after eight years of falling, residential rents have now been increasing since 2015. Beatriz Toribo, Fotocasa head of research, a growth in demand is boosting rental values which are now up by 4.8% year on year. A breakdown of the figures show that rents increased in 15 regions in the second quarter of the year compared to the previous quarter and in 16 regions year on year. The highest annual increase to data was recorded in May this year when rental prices increased by 5%. But the recovery still has some way to go as average rents are now 26.8% lower than they were at the peak of the market in May 2007 when they were €10.12 per square meter per month on average. But in three regions prices are down even more. Monthly rents are some 39.6% lower than peak in Aragon, 35.2% lower in Castilla La man cha and 33.7% down in Cantabria. The most expensive rents are in Madrid at €10.36 per square meter per month, followed by Catalonia at €10.24 and then the Basque Country at €10.16. The most affordable rental prices are in Extremadura at €4.56 and Castilla La Mancha at €4.69. Continue reading
Survey reveals over a quarter of UK tenants felt rushed into an agreement
Over a quarter of tenants in the UK feel that they were rushed into entering their tenancy agreement, particularly in London, a new survey has found. Overall 27% felt rushed and more than half regretted renting their current property, according to the research commissioned by Ocean Finance. Such is the competition in the rentals market that 1.5 million tenants, some 8% of renters, signed their tenancy agreement on the day they viewed the property. One in 10 said the turnaround between viewing and entering the tenancy was two to three days, and a similar number said they signed the agreement between four and seven days after the viewing. The survey found that 18 to 24 year olds are the most likely to act hastily when renting with 46% saying that they felt rushed into signing. By contrast, just 17% of those aged over 55 felt pressured to sign quickly to secure the property. Tenants in London felt under the most pressure to sign quickly to secure a house or flat with 40% rushing into it but renters in Northern Ireland also felt under the same amount of pressure. By contrast, just 12% of tenants in Wales felt the pressure to sign. Riddled with regret Of those tenants that say they felt under pressure to sign their agreement, half say that they wish they hadn’t done so with 10% saying the property is too cold, 9% that it was too small and 9% also saying it needed work done on it. Some 8% regretted their decision because they did not like the area, 6% said there was not enough garden, 4% felt it lacked character and 4% thought it was too old fashioned while 2% found it was too far away from amenities. ‘Our figures demonstrate just how hard it is to rent a property across much of the UK. The best properties are often snapped up within hours or even minutes. As a result, would be tenants feel under pressure to sign quickly to secure the property,’ said Ian Williams, Ocean’s spokesperson. ‘Sadly, half of those go on to regret their haste, finding themselves in a home that they don’t like or which doesn’t suit them,’ he added. Continue reading
Researcher blames government not rich foreign buyers for UK housing crisis
Decades of planning policies that constrain the supply of houses and land and turn them into something like gold or artworks is to blame for the current housing crisis in the UK rather than foreign buyers, according to a new analysis. The problem is not foreign speculators buying luxury flats as an investment in London which then lie empty but that for more than 30 years not enough homes have been built, says Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of economic geography at the London School of Economics. He also believes that homes that have been built have too often been in the wrong place or of the wrong type to meet demand. For example, twice as many houses were built in Doncaster and Barnsley in the five years to 2013 than in Oxford and Cambridge. It means that in northern cities more homes have been built that in the southern part of the country where the demand and population is greater. Pace has also not kept up to demand. According to his analysis from 1969 to 1989 over 4.3 million houses were built in England but from 1994 to 2012 there were fewer than 2.7 million. In 2009, the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, which was set up as an independent technical source of advice in the wake of the Barker Reviews of housing supply and planning, estimated that to stabilise affordability, it would be necessary to build between 237,800 and 290,500 houses a year. On a conservative estimate, that implies building 260,000 houses a year, which over 19 years would mean a total of over 4.9 million. Taking the difference between actual building between 1969 and 1989 and the advice unit’s estimate of necessary annual building, this implies that between 1994 and 2012, building fell short of what was needed by between 1.6 and 2.3 million houses. ‘This is what explains the crisis of housing affordability. We have a longstanding and endemic crisis of housing supply and it is caused primarily by policies that intentionally constrain the supply of housing land. It is not surprising to find that house prices increased by a factor of 3.36 from the start of 1998 to late 2013 in Britain as a whole and by a factor of 4.24 over the same period in London,’ said Cheshire. He explained that it is a long standing problem as discounting inflation, house prices have gone up fivefold since 1955 but the price of the land needed to put houses on has increased in real terms by 15 fold over the same period. He also explained that in the UK houses are converted from places in which to live into the most important financial asset people have and the little land you can build them on becomes not just an input into house construction but a financial asset in its own right. ‘In other words, what policy is doing is turning houses and housing land into something like… Continue reading
