All the latest news from Valencia Property

Last week we talked about the places we thought that were worth looking at (And also Oropesa) to the North of Valencia. Today we go down the coast from Valencia towards and into Alicante to show you places you should be investigating if you are interested in living near the best beaches in Valencia. As we mentioned last week the majority of our clients want to live in or around Valencia but that doesn't mean if you want to live elsewhere we cannot give you the best service possible. Our tentacles reach out both up and down the coast despite our focus being the city of Valencia itself and the areas around it.

We have talked in these pages before about what people are looking for when buying their Valencia Property and we have also talked about what to do as an owner to make your property look as attractive as possible to a buyer. What we haven't done however is to tell you how to add value to your Valencia Property, whether that be a perceived or real value. There are many ways to do this and today we will be looking at some of the best, what these steps are likely to cost you and when and where they are possible.

We are getting lots of requests from people at the moment asking us similar questions but one of the most repeated is "What's happening in the market?" We talked about this in our latest podcast, which you can listen to here, but today we thought it would be an idea to give you even more information about what is happening in the market, what's happening about the offers, the mortgages, the way we are working and getting everything ready for your Valencia Property purchase. 

About a year and a half ago we put up a post called the First Step to Buying Valencia Property. In it we included a form (You should fill it in by the way, I've included it below) where we asked for your must haves, would likes and definitely must not haves. I think it has been our most useful post ever on the site as it gets people thinking about what they really want when they are looking to buy property in Valencia and we get more of an idea of what people really want before they come over. Since we published it, hundreds of people have filled in the form and therefore we have a lot of data regarding people's requirements and we are able to present today an overview of what people are looking for when they look to buy a Valencia Property.

When you go to another country to live obviously you need to learn the lingo sooner or later, it's better sooner so get onto it straight away. Having lived here in Valencia for years all of us here at Valencia Property speak Spanish fluently, some with more of an accent than others of course, and one of the things we understand more than anything is the lingo of the Valencia Property purchase. Today, therefore we are going to help you to navigate your way around the language that you may hear when visiting Valencia Property. Owners and agents can be a bit mad and they will say all sorts of rubbish just to avoid an awkward silence or pause in the conversation. Suffice to say that you can basically prepare a bingo card to play along with as you visit properties with these sayings from owners and agents that you get to hear very often.

As you may have noticed there has been no movement on the blog in the last month. That's because just like everyone else in Spain we essentially stopped for the summer. Our colleague Paul was around as his significant other likes working in August so he goes away at other times and he gave a great service to the few clients around while also listing some properties on our main site, you can see them on the Valencia Property homepage. Over the next few weeks we will be updating the blog every week and bringing out a new podcast episode which is already partially written and we may be updating the main site in a big way but one that you may not notice for a time.

Last year we wrote that the Valencia Property market had gone mad, you can read it here. (We got a content warning from Facebook that the post was discriminatory, go figure) Now we need to write that it has gone ever more mad, madder perhaps or "completamente loco"? The first two months of the year were the busiest we have ever experienced (In 22 years of doing this) and things are continuing that way so far in March 2022 despite...(Looks around and waves an arm in the air)... the World... so we are going to let you into a few secrets about the Valencia Property market as it stands so you can get ready for what is happening when you visit.

One of the strange things that always seems to confuse people is that at Valencia Property we work for the buyer. Our role of the buyer's agent isn't understood completely by everyone outside of the United States but we have built a business based on that model over the last twenty years and it is starting to be understood here too. However, that doesn't mean our advice is limited to what we explain to our clients, the buyers, at times we have to advise the sellers on what they need to do, get prepared for and finally pay when they sell. So just in case you are a seller, in this article we are going to look at your responsibilities, what you need to provide and what you need to pay when selling your house in Valencia or Spain.

Many years ago, back in the dim and distant past of 2017, in the before days, I wrote an article on this blog about the fact that we are not "lucky" to be living in Valencia or Spain but we have planned it and it's all part of Lifestyle Design, you can read it here. Today I want to expand a little on that blog post and emphasise what a good decision coming to Valencia was and still coming to Valencia can be for you. Let's call today the year 2AC (After Covid) And yes I know Covid is still around and causing major misery to people all around the World so maybe better to call it 2SC (Since Covid) In 2SC the consequences of the Pandemic and mad decisions made in 2016 are coming home to roost around the World but today we are going to compare Valencia with two places that made especially mad decisions in 2016, the UK and the USA.

This week there wasn't supposed to be a blog post. The writer of these posts, that'll be me, Graham, was supposed to be away lapping up the cool, cloudy weather of Asturias in Northern Spain, eating too much, pouring cider from a great height and generally swithching off. However, despite what many people think Covid is still around and it's back big time in Spain this week. It probably got brought back to my house last week from my wife's school and Covid in its infinite wisdom decided to hit the whole family at once, meaning that we didn't have to self isolate in a room at home at least.

I got riled by Facebook this week. I know, I know, I should just avoid it like an increasing number of people are doing but I couldn't let it lie this time. Apparently, according to people in Facebook groups at least, you cannot go to see properties in Valencia at the weekend because, and I quote, "all agents are a bunch of workshy cowboys who don't do anything to justify the commission payments they receive on making sales". And as you know people in Facebook groups are reasonable people with considered opinions who are not know-alls at all and know everything about everything despite never having worked in any of the industries they opine on so it must be true right?

When I first moved to Valencia in 1998 we lived in a small rented house in L'Eliana. My wife had visited Valencia to look for a place while I prepared the van for the move and she was advised by everyone at the school she was going to be working at that L'Eliana was the place to be. She rented a small house with a patio at the back and essentially a fishpond for a pool and we moved in that August. Six months later we bought our own house in la Pobla de Vallbona, the next town out from L'Eliana, because we couldn't afford the prices of L'Eliana and La Pobla was around 30% cheaper despite the fact you can walk from one to the other in 20 minutes. Over twenty years later L'Eliana continues to be the place that people from Valencia aspire to live in, along with a few others that we will mention later and La Pobla continues to be around 30% cheaper because the basics don't change.

We have just produced the final episode of the first series of the Valencia Property podcast (You can listen to all the episodes here). We are not finishing with the Podcast we are just going to a new schedule as it has been majorly successful for us as a marketing tool and we love doing it as it gives us more of a connection with our clients. It's amazing how many people listen to podcasts these days. So today we are going to look back at what we have done so far on the podcast, tell you where to find those episodes, look at what the podcast has done for us as a company and look at the state of the property market through the lens of the properties we have sold this year, in terms of prices, availability, nationalities buying and a whole lot more.

Everyone who has been to visit us in the last year has asked the same question in one or more ways, "What has happened to the Brits coming here in the last year?" Americans ask it, the Dutch ask it and virtually everyone else asks us but most of all the Brits who visit us ask it because they can't understand the reason for the harm that has been imposed on their own island by the increasingly corrupt and incompetent UK government. I suppose we get asked it because we are British and everyone is interested in how a country can be so so so stupid as to impose restrictions on its own citizens by leaving the most successful trading and cultural block in the World

Today's post looks at whether you are getting value for money when buying a property in Valencia. To decide this we must look at what we mean by the term value for money because it means different things to different people. What is the measure we are going to use? To determine this we are going to use four metrics. 1) Reference Values 2) Comparative Methods 3) Space and M2 Price 4) National and International Comparisons