All the latest news from Valencia Property

I thought it would be a good idea to take you through the Spanish Property Magazine for the iPad. Now for those of you who don't have an iPad you might be interested in taking a look to see what it looks like. For those of you who have an iPad then take a look at what the magazine offers you.

It has been very remiss of me over the last month or so but very few properties have been added onto the Valencia Property site. No excuses because if things are selling, as they are despite what you may read, then I need to replace the properties that have been sold with others that are equal or better deals.

August has been quiet in Valencia Property land. Not too many clients through the doors which is unusual but September is looking very very busy at the moment. Therefore a little bit of advice and some dates to avoid. Firstly if you are coming over to visit and look at some properties make sure to give me plenty of time to organise your visits. Mail me and reserve your space. Also the 12th and 13th of September are probably out as it looks like I may be in Madrid on those dates.

The last two weeks in Valencia have had people complaining about the heat but funnily enough it is not actually as hot as normal according to the numbers, just around 32 degrees every day. However we are getting a really humid period at the moment and you walk around dripping. This is not the case in all parts of Spain, Madrid is a lot hotter but dry, Seville just gets seriously hot, North West Spain copies the UK weather patterns, rain, sunny spells and if it isn't raining it has just rained or it's about to rain.

We do very few rentals but every year in September we have an influx of teachers and parents coming into the international schools looking for rental property. Therefore we take on some good properties for rental in the city as this is where the majority of the teachers want to live and we take on some villas for the parents and their families.

I went on holiday last week to my favourite place in Spain, Asturias. Why is it my favourite? The food and the people. Why couldn't I live there, the food! Honestly I would be at least twenty kilos heavier if I lived in Asturias. The food is voluminous and gorgeous. The weather isn't great in Asturias you know. It is not called the green coast for no reason. It rains. We were there for ten days and we had two full beach days possible although we did actually go to the beach more than that, not too much just enough to not get bored.

I was looking in YouTube at a few things today and came upon this video of Valencia. Not seen it before so I thought you might like to see it too. It includes most of the things that you can se when you come to Valencia and bear in mind that taking pictures in Valencia is different at different times of day and year.

After a hiatus we are back with our summer special. Some actual positive news out of Spain and a few stories you may have missed under the radar because it seems that only bad news sells. So Spain is Different 20 can be seen here with stories including: 1) If Not France, Why Not Spain? 2) A Tourist Visit To Aragón 3) The A-Z of Seville

Always being one to innovate and make things different I thought it time to incorporate some new things into the property platform and blog. So anyway what is new and coming up? 1) This is not ground breaking at all but it will complement the current presentation of properties well. There is an app on the ipad and iphone called Magic Plan. I have normally not got time to get the plans done of properties unless the owners can provide one. However I have my daughter working with me over the summer and she is supplying me with plans of properties that are on the site

You may have noticed a lack of posts in the last few weeks on the blog. This is due to the usual stupor of the Spanish summer and also to me having been on holiday for ten days in France. Anyway I got back and had promised you some pictures from the wildfires that had affected Valencia so I went out the other day and took some on the Altury Estate and around Turis.

I really hate writing articles when an open goal is presented and it is like shooting fish in a barrel but the French government has just presented Spain with a historic opportunity. What’s happened? Well the Spanish government has started to try and encourage foreign investment by two measures: Firstly, as a foreigner, if you buy a property this year then they have cut any potential capital gains tax in half. Secondly, and this one is under consideration at the moment, if you buy a property for more than 250,000 euros then you may well be granted automatic residency (a nod to the far East buyers and eastern Europe perhaps) Couple this with the prices having fallen by around 40% from peak and there is a great opportunity to pick up some excellent bargain property in Spain.

Tired of all of the sniping at Spain? Hating the way Spain is presented in the press? Like to point out the good points about Spain? Me too. Therefore along with a group of friends, Writers and Bloggers about Spain (Our Facebook group) we created the hashtag #SpainIs... on twitter in order to promote the positivity about the country despite all of the problems. And guess what? It was a major success. Here is a report in Sur in English newspaper about it

Last week, tragedy hit the Valencia region. You may have heard about it and you may not but over 48500 hectares of interior Valencia was burnt by wildfires. How does this compare with other fires? Well you may have seen that Obama visited the scenes of the Colorado wildfires and have been horrified by the images presented. Valencia’s fires covered an area five times greater

It has been over 40 degrees which is very unusual but it looks like it will be ten degrees less tomorrow which is when the practice starts for the Valencia Grand Prix. Who will win this year? Well whoever gets to the first corner first probably ;-) Let's hope we at least have a Mark Webber moment to liven things up. The point of all this of course is that this is the last year when Valencia will have a Grand Prix every year. In future it will take turns with Barcelona. However this shouldn't effect the real estate market in the Cabanyal area of Valencia as it has fallen a long way on the back of broken promises to gentrify the area and extend Blasco Ibañez Avenue down to the beach.

I don't want to sound like a vulture here but the current malaise brought on Spain by the markets is having a positive effect in certain ways. The banks are being forced to lower their ridiculously optimistic prices on their stock of properties in many cases and there are finally some decent prices around. In the last few weeks we have sold various properties from various banks but among them are a couple of well positioned apartments in Valencia that we have managed to get for clients at bargain prices. The majority of the stuff from banks continues to be overpriced, which may change, badly located, which will never be changed and badly advertised, which again will probably not change.

The nineteenth issue of Spain is Different is now out. It is a cornucopia of posts from a Facebook group I have of Writers and Bloggers About Spain. Of course on the suggestion of Yolanda, one of the members of the group, we should rename it as "Writers Against Bullsh*it About Spain" due to a lot of the rubbish being put out there at the moment especially in the Mail and Telegraph.