All the latest news from Valencia Property

At the back end of October last year we wrote about the rental crisis in Valencia and what it meant for buyers, tenants and us as a business moving forward. Last week on the podcast we updated you on what has been happening since and today here we are going into a bit more details on that and connecting that to the progress we are making in the background of the new Stepping Stone Rentals website and project in order to help alleviate some of those problems. Firstly though, just to let you know one thing, Valencia Property continues to be hugely busy while at the same time starting up a new business, website and finding new employees from scratch. We have just had a week with the most property enquiries seen for about six months. And we haven't had a huge slowdown in the intervening period either, it's just that in December demand was off the scale

Unfortunately in the last week we have had to say goodbye to a couple of clients, allowing them to continue their Valencia Property journey without our assistance. There are a litany of reasons why and in today's post we will go into why you may sabotage your own purchase even if you really want the property. Bear in mind that these clients may have made one, various, many or even all of the following faux pas in the last few weeks before we decided to cut them loose. You may even want to play a game of guessing how many of the following mistakes one particular client made before we decided to stop working with them.

Once again on arriving at the half way point of the year we are on target for a record number of sales this year with a large throughput of clients and also so many in the pipeline that summer is looking difficult holiday wise. However, recently we have been getting a load of calls along the lines of... "We are buying a property through another agent but we could do with some advice" "We have already bought a place but have just found your blog and we need some help" So today here is the Valencia Propery network which we put in place for our own clients.

As an add-on to last week's post about our network people have been asking what our day looks like as estate agents in Valencia. What do we actually do all day. Now a couple of months ago I put up a little video short showing a bit of this, you can see it below, but today I thought it was time to show a bit of background of what we do on a daily basis to make sure we give the best possible service of any estate agency in Spain or potentially the World. I actually wrote an article like this in 2011 on this blog but I thought an update was due because things have changed.

Sometimes we get a bit blase about living in Valencia. We talk about the year round enviable climate, the ease of living, its compactness meaning it has the advantages of big city living but the feel of a much smaller metropolis and the fact that Valencia, once the hidden jewel of the Mediterranean, has now been found by the international press and is most definitely on the circuit for lifestyle bloggers and digital nomads. Voted recently as the best place to live in the World, twice, Valencia has a lot to offer you in terms of lifestyle and value for money whether that money is in Dollars, Pounds, Euros or even Czech Crowns.

The numbers of American clients that pass through our virtual doors at Valencia Property continues to grow. Year on year and quarter by quarter we continue to see greater numbers of Americans looking to buy real estate in Valencia either to settle here or to have a holiday home leading up to retirement when they intend to settle permanently. We are often asked why this is and we constantly see posts online asking those who have already made the move whether it was worth it. The answers are almost 100% positive by those who have moved. So today on the blog we thought we would look at why Americans specifically are attracted to Valencia and, by extension, Spain.

Let's not make any bones about it but townhouses are an enigma. Here at Valencia Property we love them. They offer loads of space, great locations, plenty of potential and community (Being in a town and surrounded by others) and they are usually great value when you look at the price per square metre. However, they often require a lot of modernisation, and the bigger they are the more that modernisation will cost, they need more upkeep than an apartment and they usually don't have the kerb appeal as what lies behind that townhouse door is often very well disguised.

What if I told you that you can maybe have it all? What if I told you that something else is possible? That you could live in or near a great city without feeling overwhelmed where people still put their own family and leisure time first and you don't have to stay in the office to impress the boss on pain of losing your job and your health insurance. What if I just talked to you about living in Spain and more precisely, living in Valencia? And finally what if I told you that everyone can have it? I'd be talking total rubbish of course. A simple move to live in another place is not going to perform miracles for anyone, never mind everyone. However, another life is possible and Valencia is one of those places where your work life balance just may become much more manageable.

In other countries when you say you live in the suburbs there is an immediate impression of a sense of something very different from city life. In the UK it's all to do with middle class aspiration and keeping up with the Joneses, curtain twitching, needing the car for everything but most especially for getting to the golf club and an impending sense of quiet boredom and doom stretching from mid life into your dotage. In the USA it's white picket fences, needing the car for everything but needing to travel much further, overbearing home owners associations, every house identical and a longing to return to main street USA where everything was to hand before the 'Burbs existed. In Spain the suburbs are different because the concept of the commute was alien to Spanish life until quite recently and most of them weren't built by a developer to a template.

When you are looking to buy a property in Valencia at the cheaper end of the market you might find that your choice is a bit restricted as prices have risen considerably in the last few years. We have talked in the past in these pages about how it's difficult to find anything with basic requirements in the city for under 150k and maybe even 180k, especially if it's relatively central. It has now become even more difficult because of a new law that came out in July of which we are just starting to see the results. If you are not aware of what a VPO property is then you need to read on.

We have been getting so many requests for medium and long term rentals lately that we thought it was time to tell you more about the options you have to work with us at Valencia Property and even Stepping Stone Rentals when you are looking to rent in and around Valencia. Some people on social media platforms thought we didn't offer rentals, we do but not on the main site. Every day there are more enquiries for rentals both for long and medium term and we are hearing more and more stories of online scams so we thought we would be clear here about what we do for you with our rental service and other rental options.

One of the most important things you have to understand about society in Spain is the role of the cafe and bar in making society function. Cafe Society in Spain cuts across social,cultural and racial boundaries as everyone takes time out during the day to have their morning coffee, often accompanied by a huge mid morning bocadillo, pinchos or tapa, and then an afternoon pick me up coffee is usual too. Whether you go into the best coffee house in the town or the lowest greasy spoon cafe you will notice one thing above all others, the coffee will still be better than in Starbucks and probably less than half the price.

For years we had a bit of an aversion to Valencian beach towns as they were always too seasonal, full in the summer and totally empty in the winter. Valencia beach towns such as Canet, El Saler, Gandia, Oliva but most of all Cullera are bucking the ghost town trend by extending their lives outside of the traditional summer months and they put on events throughout the year. Equally, now that summers are longer and winters milder they are great places to be outside of the possibly too hot summer months. This means that places which were previously considered as just summer areas are now getting a second life in the other nine months of the year and as they have wonderful beaches and plenty to do outside of the main tourist season they are getting on the map much more.

Before we start let's get this clear. The reason we are encouraging people to buy property to rent out is to bring more rental properties onto the market and help to sort out the rental crisis in Valencia. This has been put into sharp focus in the last week with the news that the number of properties available to rent has gone down by over 40% this year alone and this is after falls in the last two years meaning that in some areas there are now up to 80% fewer available properties to rent than a few years ago pre-pandemic. The knock-on effects of this are manifold but suffice to say price rises due to lack of supply, difficulties in finding suitable and affordable accommodation for locals, students and incomers and pressures on current tenants coming up to the end of their contracts are among them.

There's one thing that we always make clear to everyone who contacts us and that is that you should bookmark our homepage and keep visiting as we upload properties. There is a reason for this, we don't advertise on property portals such as Idealista, Kyero, Fotocasa, Pisos and more and therefore you will not see our properties on those portals meaning you might miss the new ones we list and they might well be sold before you see it. But why don't we appear on property portals? Surely they are useful for advertising properties to everyone right? Well, yes and no. There are a myriad of methods of advertising properties be they through portals, social media, video, collaborations and most importantly our own network of the website and blog.

If you are an assiduous follower of this blog then you'll know that in the late summer we launched Stepping Stone Rentals, our first step, three month rental platform for properties in Valencia. This was done because of the rental crisis in Valencia which we originally wrote about here in October of last year then updated here in June this year which meant that it was extremely difficult for our clients coming into Valencia (And everybody else) to find rental accomodation in Valencia remotely. When you added this to the scams online we thought it time to do something to help out.

It's a New Year and for many of you that will mean a new start and if that new start is in Valencia then let us help you set foot with confidence into the Valencia Property market. As usual we will be here in Valencia waiting for you into our 25th year, our first sale was made in Summer 2000, making us the longest established estate agency for foreigners in Valencia. As we mentioned in the last blog post the last two years have been our most successful ever and have allowed us to make steps into new services and projects to become a full service estate agent for anyone looking to move to Valencia for the medium and long term.

We keep getting asked why we work as we do as an international buyers agent in Valencia. It's quite difficult to explain to people who are coming from outside Valencia how the Valencia Property Market works as it differs radically from other countries and even from other parts of Spain. As the premier buyers agent in Valencia, I set up Valencia Property 25 years ago after going through the process of purchasing a property here in Valencia, right from the start we were working as buyers agents as a friend asked me to help them buy a property here after seeing the pain I had been through when buying. So from day one we have been focussed on the needs of the buyer here as we knew that this particular market wasn't been served well by the estate agency system in place at the time.