All the latest news from Valencia Property

Once upon a time a very, very long time ago there was a country where the people were reasonable. In this country people were not driven by greed, people were not driven by stupidity and people were not driven by their own, totally unreasonable, expectations.

Just like in English there is a totally unspoken language within property adverts in Spain. Where in English you need to read between the lines and understand that "bijou", "compact" and "cozy" all mean "Oh my god never mind a cat you couldn't even swing a hamster in here" Spanish Property Adverts have their own language and you need to understand it before making any decisions to view.

This is the 800th post in Houses For Sale In Spain. That is a lot of posts! Starting before the crisis in Spain when the website was a blogger blog called Valencia Comment (You can see the first post here) the blog has developed over the years keeping people interested in buying property in Spain up to date with developments in the Spanish Property Market and Spain itself.

You are born, you go to school, you get a job, and eventually you die. Surely there's something better in the middle. We are on this small planet for threescore years and 10 apparently. If that is the case why would you spend a lot of that time working in a box with the same day to day routine boring you until you retire and get a clock. Work in the world is changing now and so should your mentality be. Let's face it, those days are now long gone when you worked 40-45 years in the same business that you had no interest in, making money for the owner who you never knew and then you retired and you got your carriage clock.

It's November and it's still 27-30 degrees during the day here in Valencia. It's not normally like this of course, except it is. As the dark nights envelop much of the North of Europe sunset here is around 6pm and it gets dark around 6.30. It's like that every year of course and we have the brightness and sunshine every year.

As we are into December I thought it was time to let you know about how the Spanish Property Market has gone in 2013. Obviously this is biased towards the Valencia region with my main catchment area being there through Valencia Property but also with the new project The Spanish Property Network we also have trends and tendencies from the rest of Spain to look at.

I have been reinstalling the Mac over the last few days after it went into intensive care and came out with a brand spanking new reformat. This has given me time to take a look at some photos as they got reinstalled. So according to iPhoto this year I have 5549 photos imported , quite a few. So there are just a few a month to tell the story of the year. I have put them on Facebook in this album.

I published this article this morning on the Spanish Property Network and the reaction was so good that I thought you might want to read it here too in case you don't know about the SPN yet. What are ten of the things that make living in Spain different? What do people miss when they leave or look forward to when they are thinking of buying in Spain? Take a look.

When you purchase a property in Spain you have to pay tax on the purchase, currently in Valencia for new and used properties the tax is 10%, in fact it is 10% on new property all around the country. In Madrid for example the cost on used property is currently 6% having been reduced at the start of the year. The cost in other areas varies from 7-10%. However you may be in for a nasty surprise unless you take certain precautions when finding yourself a bargain. Let's look at an example.

Over the last couple of days I have been sent a couple of videos about Valencia that have made me very happy. Why? Well simply put they are feelgood videos about a city beginning to wake up to the spring at the same time that it realises that it doesn't need to hide its light under a bushel because simply put it is beautiful and well worth showing off.

When you are looking to come and live in Spain and maybe to buy a house for sale in Spain you are going to a different country (Obvious huh?) with different customs and different ways of doing things. Therefore there are some things that you will need to get used to. Spain will not change in the near future but you need to do so if you want to fit comfortably into your new home (the house and the area).

It is a well known fact that sales of property in Spain are at historically low figures at the moment when compared with other years. However the figures themselves are skewed somewhat by the fact that they do not tend to distinguish between the diminished internal demand (due to lack of credit and the ongoing crisis meaning that Spain has effectively been in a crushing recession since 2007) and the soaring international demand for Spanish property that has now reached or even exceded 2007 levels in many areas due to the low prices, favourable exchange rate and the fact that many other countries are now exiting their own recessions.

We posted a very popular post on the Spanish Property Blog last week.Titled "The Four Horsemen of the Spanish Property Apocalypse". Within it we explained how to get a bargain in Spain without going to a bank for their rather badly located properties. Take a look and if you have any questions just ask. When you are looking for a property as a buyer you are obviously looking for a bargain that suits your requirements. Those requirements will be exclusive to you, ie different from anyone else, but you can almost guarantee that the property you buy will have many of the characteristics that others are searching for too (This is why we said that there are not actually that many properties really for sale in Spain here) One thing that you are looking for though is summed up in the Spanish Property search mantra "Bueno, Bonito y Barato" (Good, pretty and cheap)

In October last year the Valencian government in its infinite wisdom (ie none) decided to raise purchase taxes on second hand property from 8% to 10%, immediately putting themselves at a disadvantage with other communities in Spain (Madrid dropped theirs to 6% in January for example). It was a stupid move that I described in depth on this blog post

I love getting feedback from clients especially when it is good. Today I got a glowing reference from a client and thought it would be nice to share it on here. Thanks to Christine for the kind words and I hope that I can help other people in the same way. For those who are not on Facebook you can read it below. For those that are why don't you like the page so you get more information about property in Spain and Valencia in particular.

As you are maybe aware we have been running a series on our Youtube channel called 100 Reasons to Live in Spain. Some are more obvious, some are a bit obscure and some are a bit left field. I have just put up the latest two on the channel and you can see them embedded in this post.

On my personal site www.grahamhunt.co we recently posted a blog about ten things you should be doing every day in Spain. You can see it at the link. However we have also recorded it using Auphonic, loaded it onto our Soundcloud page and placed it into Youtube too. You can also listen to it below. So if you prefer listening to reading then take a listen below and take to heart the ten things you should be doing every day in Spain.

I spend a lot of my time online telling people "We have a blog post about that" And that's because we get asked the same questions over and over and we use those questions as the basis for blog posts. However, at times we get questions that floor us, not because we don't know the answer but because, well... just because. Now you dear reader haven't got a single stupid question in your head, we know that and respect you for it. But we also know that despite the fact that you wouldn't ask a stupid question that there are others in the World who might and it seems that many of those people inhabit the nether regions of Facebook or they just send me a whatsapp out of the blue and say something like, "Does Spain have debit cards?" or "Have you ever seen this product in Spain as I am thinking of moving there and want to import them?" or "Does your website require our SEO services?" (Whoops that last one is just the constant stream of spam) The answers of course are yes, no and not from you.