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Statistics |
| Unique Visitors: 14 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 94241 |
| Visitors Out: 2475 |
| Total Visitors Out: 2475 |
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| Costa del Sol property sales are falling, but the top end is strong |
| 2008-05-10 16:20:00 |
The news that one of the Costa del Sol's biggest estate agents has filed for voluntary insolvency has deepened the gloom over southern Spain's property market. Viva Estates was one of the area's biggest success stories. It was set up ten years ago by an Englishman, Chris McCarthy, used the cricketer Ian Botham to raise its profile and within a few years operated from 15 offices. In the past 12 months, all but one of those offices has closed and more than 100 staff have lost their jobs.“At one time we were selling 200 properties a month,” McCarthy says. “Now we sell around 25. A 90 per cent fall in business is hard for any company to take but we've taken the responsible route. Our advisers said, ‘the option is there to help you so use it', and we have. We have one large office, about 60 staff and we're confident we can keep trading. We have been hit from all sides by economic factors but it's the exchange rate against sterling that has really floored us.”
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| Spanish Feb property sales down 24.4 pct year-on-year |
| 2008-05-03 02:55:00 |
MADRID (Thomson Financial) - Property sales in Spain plummeted 24.4 percent in February from a year earlier, according to official data released on Monday, in yet another sign of the sharp downturn in the once booming real estate market.The fall is slightly less than the 27 percent decline reported for January.In February, there were 55,462 urban property transactions, a drop of 10.2 percent from January, the National Statistics Institute said.The total for the first two months of the year is down 25.85 percent compared to the same period in 2007.
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| Expats hit by house price fall in Spain |
| 2008-04-21 04:07:00 |
The average price of homes rose by four per cent in the past 12 months, less than Spain's 4.6 per cent inflation rate, the housing ministry said.In a sign that the world financial crisis is starting to bite in continental Europe, rising interest rates have reduced Spanish spending power after 12 years of economic expansion, immigration and declining unemployment that had spurred a boom in real estate investment.
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| Spain offers good value property |
| 2008-04-17 05:19:00 |
According to Mr Walker, the cost of purchasing and maintaining a property in Spain has "never been lower".He commented: "There have been falls of around 20 per cent and in the last six months it has switched to be a buyer's market."This could be of interest to people who are not necessarily looking for investment properties, such as those who are planning to retire to Spain.
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| Spain markets hurting, but SIMA still draws international crowd |
| 2008-04-14 10:01:00 |
SIMA closed Saturday with attendance down only slightly from 2007. Although final figures are not yet available, show officials said the number of visitors looking for deals on the show floor was about 150,000, compared to 160,000 for last year’s edition of the world’s largest property show.he figures were welcome good news for event organizers, after the number of exhibitors fell to 600 from 800 in 2007, primarily due to the problems in Spain. Exhibition director Eloy Bohúa acknowledged “expectations were low,” considering the uncertainty of property markets around the country.
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| International Real Estate - Madrid Real Estate Exhibition |
| 2008-04-10 16:04:00 |
The tenth edition of the International Madrid Estate">Real Estate Exhibition, to be celebrated from April 8th to April 12th, 2008, will reflect its definitive consolidation as the ultimate global business center. This year, besides Latin American exhibitors, other companies have confirmed their participation, such as those from the Far East [Vietnam, Filipinas, Thailand, Malaysia o Singapore], -which represent a 7% of the international exhibitors-, and from countries with a huge increment of their residential markets [China, United Arab Emirates or South Africa].Foreign company participation has increased up to 60% compared to the last edition, and this year, 202 companies will participate in this area. Also, 64% of those international companies are from Latin America, and the most outstanding participation growth is from Eastern Europe companies, mainly from Poland, Romania and Hungary, which represent the 10% of the total.
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| Spanish Property Auction |
| 2008-04-04 16:55:00 |
April 4 (Bloomberg) -- Thanks to Spain's slumping property market, house buyers are as popular as movie stars and they can cause even more excitement.Reporters outnumbered bidders as lot No. 1 hit the slate in Europe's first ``Dutch auction'' for real estate last weekend in Madrid. Of 216 lots, 194 were withdrawn when they weren't purchased at the reserve price. One man, investor Manuel Sainz, bought almost half of everything sold.``Next stop Hollywood!'' laughed Sainz, head of property company Las Terrazas de San Blas SA, as he fought off the press after buying 10 properties at discounts of as much as 30 percent.
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| Selective property investment could find value in Spain |
| 2008-04-01 15:26:00 |
A report in the Telegraph suggested that even in areas of southern Spain, a region that has been subject to high levels of development, there are still investment opportunities that offer real rewards.Local market expert Sean Collins said that investors who are selective about their purchases could find "great value" in Spain.The Pure International managing director explained that "opportunistic" investors could take advantage of properties on the market in Costa del Sol, where there is established and reliable infrastructure, financing and rental pools.
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| Spain's property market suffers meltdown |
| 2008-03-30 03:15:00 |
Spain's once-booming property market is in freefall, official statistics have revealed for the first time.The announcement that house sales had plunged has dashed government hopes for a "soft landing" in the sector that has driven the Spanish economy for more than a decade.The buying and selling of homes fell by 27 per cent in January compared with the same period last year, Spain's National Statistical Institute (INE) announced yesterday. The collapse coincided with a 25 per cent fall in the granting of mortgages, the biggest drop since 2004. The size of individual mortgages has also fallen, by nearly 4 per cent, as providers fear for the security of their loans.
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| Shares in Spain's heavily-indebted property giant Colonial rebounded on Tuesday |
| 2008-03-26 05:46:00 |
Colonial's shares had lost more than 23 percent on Thursday, the day after a takeover bid by the Investment Corporation of Dubai fell apart when the sovereign wealth fund failed to reach an agreement with creditor banks to refinance the Spanish group's massive debt.Colonial, the second-biggest Spanish property group which own offices and malls in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris, was more than 8.9 billion euros (13.8 billion dollars) in debt at the end of 2007.
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| Need for real estate authors from spain |
| 2008-03-23 18:11:00 |
Hi from Tam Tree , hope you like the spain Estate">real estate news blog.I need authors from spain to help me coverage the areas of Madrid valensia and Barcelona .Please send email if you like to participated in this effort. Thanks a lot !tamtree@gmail.com
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| Colonial Shares Slump After Banks Block Sale of Unit |
| 2008-03-22 10:38:00 |
Investment Corp. bid for the Colonial unit on March 11, a week after its cash-and-securities offer for all of Colonial was rejected. A slump in the Spanish real-estate market caused Colonial to lose 4.8 billion euros of its value in six months and made it a more attractive target.Colonial owes 6.3 billion euros to banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Eurohypo AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. The company and its biggest shareholders have accepted the offer by Investment Corp., a sovereign wealth fund owned by the government of the Persian Gulf emirate.The Dubai fund said yesterday that ``if there's any possibility of an agreement with Colonial, apart from the terms contemplated in the March 11 agreement, ICD will consider it.''
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| Investors craving property in Spain should wait out slump |
| 2008-03-19 15:16:00 |
Spanish property has long been favored by second home owners from all reaches of the world. The Southern European country was the second most popular destination for international vacationers in 2006, behind France, according to the World Tourism Organization (WTO). But after the Spanish property market’s recent downswing, is Spain still the attractive vacation home locale it once was? For now, those interested in Spanish property investments may be better off waiting to see what the market does.Spain is home to more than 40 million people and covers a total area of 504,782 square kilometers. The Mediterranean Sea flows alongside the country’s southern and eastern coasts, making these areas particularly desirable to holidaymakers and second home owners.
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| Spain's embattled real estate sector received more bad news |
| 2008-03-16 05:00:00 |
"In 2007, the total number of property transactions was 788,518, a drop of 13.93 per cent over 2006," the CRE, an organisation that collects data on property transactions, said in a report.The largest drop was in sales of older homes, which saw a decline of 15.05 percent, compared to 12.41 percent in new properties, it said.In the fourth quarter, the decline was even more pronounced, with transactions plummeting 21 percent from 203,993 in 2006 to 161,906 in the same period in 2007.
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| Spain bank slashes property lending as crisis looms |
| 2008-03-12 02:23:00 |
One of Spain's biggest private savings banks has slashed lending to property developers which are caught in a looming housing crisis and barely able to sell land or property, its head of property lending told Reuters on Tuesday.Jose Aguilar Martin, head of real estate at Seville-based Cajasol, said the bank was not lending to firms building holiday homes on the coast nor to property developers planning to build in areas designated as 'rural'.
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| Investment Corp. of Dubai (ICD) will buy Spanish real estate giant Inmobiliaria Colonial SA, |
| 2008-03-08 03:37:00 |
After a few days of on-and-off negotiations, it appears that the Investment Corp. of Dubai (ICD) will buy Spanish Estate">real estate giant Inmobiliaria Colonial SA, though as of Thursday afternoon, no deal had been definitively announced.It is also possible, according to a report yesterday afternoon by Reuters, that the ICD will only buy the rental property unit of Colonial, leaving the development unit to the company's main shareholders.However, a serious downturn in the Spanish real estate market, led by slumping residential sales, has left Colonial with about 8.6 billion euros worth of
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| GE Real Estate Iberia dropped out of the competition for Colonial |
| 2008-03-05 14:59:00 |
Spanish property firm Colonial announced it enjoyed a substantial increase in profits in 2007, as the firm faced an acquisition deadline of today from Investment Corp. of Dubai. Colonial said net profit jumped last year to $129.7 million from $26.1 million, due to its acquisition of Spanish mall developer Riofisa, and a nearly $840 million increase in the value of its assets.Many Estate">real estate firms in Spain have been confronting significant financial problems of late, especially if they have large residential divisions, as residential housing has been overbuilt in the country, said Roger Cooke, managing partner of Cushman & Wakefield Spain. Gauging these companies’ health comes down to three factors: the extent of t
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| Reckoning looms for two Spanish real estate giants |
| 2008-03-02 16:13:00 |
Spain's ailing Estate">real estate sector faces one of its toughest tests to date, as time runs out for two of its biggest companies in make-or-break talks with potential saviors.Inmobiliaria Colonial SA (COL.MC) and Habitat Inmobiliaria SA are both working against the clock to avoid bankruptcy. Their challenges also mirror the difficulties of companies that took up loans for string of pricey acquisitions before the Spanish red-hot real estate market soured.For Habitat, a large Barcelona-based home developer, the failure of five out of a syndicate of 39 banks to sign into a refinancing agreement by last Friday forced the company to extend talks to Wednesday.
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| Spain: Elections Dominated by Economic Downturn |
| 2008-02-27 03:28:00 |
Spain is set to elect a new government on March 9. After the bursting of the real estate bubble, the economy has witnessed a pronounced slowdown. As a result, economic issues have dominated the campaign. It is still anybody’s guess as to whether the ruling Socialist Party or the opposition Partido Popular will emerge victorious.An interview with Adrian Zürcher, Credit Suisse Global Equity Strategist, about Spain’s economic outlook after the election:
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| Spain's Habitat Refinances Loan After Breaching Terms |
| 2008-02-23 09:56:00 |
Habitat, which borrowed to buy a unit of Madrid-based builder Grupo Ferrovial SA in 2006, needs the loan after violating terms of debt agreements by missing earnings and sales targets. The company, the biggest real-estate borrower to seek new financing as Spain's decade-long property boom ends, will agree to sell assets to pay part of the seven-year loans, the bankers said.Twin Falls SL, the Spanish real-estate venture part-owned by Merrill Lynch & Co., sought court protection from creditors in Madrid last week.
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| Spanish Developer Leaves Projects Unfinished |
| 2008-02-20 16:45:00 |
A major Spanish development company has dropped a number of building projects which were currently underway in the Valencia region, according to reports in the Costa Blanca News.Hundreds of families, who have purchased properties off-plan in Olocau, near Valencia, found out last week that all contact with Vanguard Investment had been terminated.
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| Own an entire estate in Spain |
| 2008-02-17 16:51:00 |
The Spanish property market has been in the headlines consistently throughout the latter half of 2007 and all the way into 2008. Media reports currently vacillate between highlighting negative issues such as the over-supply of apartments in some locations which has had a detrimental effect on pricing, and focusing on the evergreen and unshakable positive factors that make Spain a consistently popular location with property buyers, retirees and expatriates.
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| Spanish Tax Authorities to Probe Real Estate Fraud |
| 2008-02-14 17:19:00 |
Spanish tax authorities have started inspecting 82,000 Estate">real estate developments for signs of fraud, reported the Spanish daily El Pais. If prices declared for the sale of properties are about the same or lower than the costs incurred by developers, that could indicate fraud, the newspaper said, citing Luis Pedroche, director of Spain's tax agency.
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| Northern Portuguese Villas |
| 2008-02-12 02:33:00 |
Is the Algarve property investment market about to burst or already bursting despite the well polished real estate sales industry's best efforts? Portugal as a whole is widely cited as being the best property investment country in western Europe, however conditions for the Algarve are looking a little shaky. Minho Villas is a sales site for one of the most prestigious "quinta" villas on the northern border with Spain and offers a very different real estate investment opportunity to the Algarve.
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| Spain is not in economic crisis |
| 2008-02-07 19:04:00 |
The 47-year-old prime minister says his Socialist government long predicted a housing market correction and is not to blame for economic fallout from the United States."We have a slowdown because of the real estate sector, this is well known, it has problems," said Zapatero. "In all other sectors the economy has absolute strength to absorb and continue absorbing these job losses."
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| Dubai Investor Eyes Spain's Colonial |
| 2008-02-03 17:27:00 |
Colonial is Spain's second-largest real-estate company by assets and has been hit hard by tightening financial conditions and sharply slowing new home sales. The company's low share price has fueled interest in a possible takeover of the company. It lost 62% of its value last year amid growing fears of a sector slowdown. In the face of a declining share price, banks in late December started unloading shares. The shares have retreated 12% this year.
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| Half of Spain’s Estate Agents Shut Down |
| 2008-01-31 05:27:00 |
This has the ring of urban myth, but the number is so huge it seems worth repeating: API, the trade association for Spanish property agents, is reporting that 40,000 estate agents—half the estate agents in the country—closed down last year, in the wake of the slowdown in the market. As a result, it is believed that as many as 100,000 property agents lost their jobs last year.
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| Santander has sold its headquarters near Madrid to Propinvest |
| 2008-01-28 00:04:00 |
The bank said total sales from the portfolio had reached €4.4bn. The bank had initially valued the real estate assets at €4bn, suggesting the Spanish property market is still holding its value in spite of well-publicised issues at developers such as Colonial.
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| Spanish real estate agencies folding |
| 2008-01-21 20:56:00 |
Half of Spain's real estate agencies have folded in the past year due to a slowdown in the once-booming building sector, an industry association says.Of 80,000 that operated at the beginning of 2007, only around 40,000 have survived and some 100,000 employees lost their jobs, according to the Superior Council of Real Estate Agents, a nationwide grouping.
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| Fall in Spanish builders overdone |
| 2008-01-17 01:42:00 |
(Reuters) - Fears of a Spanish property meltdown have knocked shares in the country's big builders in recent months, but stocks are unlikely to bounce back in the short term despite their limited exposure to real estate.Yet analysts say Spain's major builders have been punished by association, despite having built a major presence in non-cyclical sectors such as power generation and having geographically diversified into regions like Eastern Europe.
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| Top Spanish estate agency hit by slump |
| 2008-01-12 17:40:00 |
Viva Estates, one of the largest estate agents on Spain's Costa del Sol, has closed all but one of its offices, the latest victim of the downtown in the country's real-estate sector. The company, which sells flats and homes to a mainly British, German and Irish clientele, has shut 13 offices and now operates only out of its main office in Marbella.It comes after the dramatic slide of Inmobiliaria Colonial SA, the third biggest real-estate company, last month. The president, Luis Portillo, was forced out after a share-price fall of 61.37 per cent in six months.
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| Colonial of Spain Declines After Equity-Swap Sales |
| 2008-01-07 09:48:00 |
Inmobiliaria Colonial SA, Spain's third-largest real estate company, fell for a third day in Madrid trading after equity-swap contracts led to additional share sales.The stock declined 13 percent to 1.63 euros, its lowest since March 2006. That cut Barcelona-based Colonial's market value to 2.7 billion euros ($4 billion.)``The drop in share price has triggered a dumping of the stock by the banks that backed the equity swaps,'' said Athena Ko, a real estate specialist at UBS AG in London.
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| Abertis buys Colonial properties for 202 mln euros |
| 2008-01-01 00:38:00 |
MADRID, Dec 31 (Reuters) - Spanish infrastructure firm Abertis (ABE.MC: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it had agreed to pay 201.6 million euros ($296.7 million) for logistics facilities owned by real estate company Colonial.The purchase follows an almost 40 percent fall in Colonial's stock price late last week, and the resignation of its chairman last week, amid fears one of Spain's largest real estate firms faced problems at the end of a real estate boom.
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| NH Hoteles to buy real estate in Spain |
| 2007-12-25 14:25:00 |
New York (Bloomberg) -- Hotelier NH Hoteles SA will consider buying Estate">real estate assets in Spain after prices started falling, ABC reported, citing comments by Chairman Gabriele Burgio. The cost of acquiring a building to be used as a hotel in a city accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of the asset's revenue, Burgio said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper. NH will take a decision on its real estate investments next spring, Burgio told ABC.
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| Alarm as Spain's once-booming property market loses steam |
| 2007-12-20 02:16:00 |
MADRID, Spain: The phones don't ring off the hook any more at Spanish real estate offices, once the beneficiaries of a sizzling property market. In fact, they hardly ring at all.Sharply higher interest rates, a glut of homes and newly jittery banks have come together to stall the engine that has driven one of Europe's top-performing economies for more than a decade. And as the market slows, so has Spain's economic growth.
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| Spanish New Home Sales Fall 30% Aug-Oct |
| 2007-12-13 03:33:00 |
MADRID (Dow Jones)--New home sales in Spain have fallen 30% between August and October as one of the euro-zone's biggest housing booms comes to an end, according to G-14, an association of the country's 14 largest construction and real-estate firms.In a meeting Wednesday with journalists, G-14 Chairman Pedro Perez Fernandez said new home sales slowed around 15% in the first half of the year.Perez said 490,000 new homes should be sold in 2007, down from 600,000 in 2006.
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| A Look At The Spanish Press |
| 2007-12-03 20:02:00 |
A high profile investigation into bribery and corruption claims within the Real Estate sector has began to recognise the extent of the problems on Spanish terrain. The Guardia Civil commenced their mission to end foul play within the industry six months ago, following allegations of large-scale exploitation of the market throughout the ten-year property boom. A spokesman from the investigation unit revealed that public officials were the worst culprits, as they were frequently accepting monetary favours to approve and accelerate building permits. He added that the units have begun to establish a register of all 'illegally' built properties located across the country. Their findings have led to the opening of 100 separate cases, 57 arrests, and charges bei
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| Spain's Globalia in talks to sell real estate broker Century 21 |
| 2007-11-28 01:14:00 |
MADRID (Thomson Financial) - Spain's Grupo Globalia is in 'advanced talks' to sell affiliate Century 21 to US Cendant Corporation for an undisclosed sum, Expansion reported, citing unnamed sources close to the operation.The operation could be closed within weeks, the newspaper reported.Nevertheless, the sources told Expansion that the 'difficult situation in the [Estate">real estate] market and Century 21's losses are going to make the selling price not very high.'
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| An explosion destroyed a real estate office Thursday in Spain's northwest Galicia |
| 2007-11-21 04:03:00 |
MADRID, Spain (AP) -- An explosion destroyed a Estate">real estate office Thursday in Spain's northwest Galicia region but no one was hurt, officials said.The pre-dawn blast occurred in the town of Cangas. Police said it had been set deliberately but the explosion did not appear to be the work of the Basque separatist group ETA.The site of the blast is about 100 meters from the town hall in Cangas. It destroyed a real estate office in the ground floor of a building and also caused damage to nearby buildings, the Interior Ministry office in the regional capital A Coruna said.Bomb disposal
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| Spanish Property Market Stalls as Bubble Bursts |
| 2007-11-16 03:17:00 |
The price of Spanish homes has risen more than 200 percent during the past 10 years, and “[a]t the height of the construction boom in 2005 there were 7,000 estate agents on the Costa Blanca,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Low mortgage rates offset the rising costs of home purchases and now approximately 95 percent of Spanish homeowners have adjustable rate mortgages, according to the Wall Street Journal.However, the Spanish property bubble has popped. In the second quarter of 2007, the rise of property prices was below the rate of inflation for the first time in 10 years. So far this year, 300 of the Costa Blanca’s real estate offices have closed their doors, according to the Daily Telegraph. Spanish homeowner
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