All the latest news from Valencia Property

We saw an article last week (in Spanish) about how all new build apartments look the same; large, imposing, white cladding and small terraces, the same materials, the same sizes, the same... everything. There's even an Instagram account for these type of blocks @bloque_cebra because they have been baptised here as "Zebra blocks" for obvious reasons. When you see them you know why. They proliferate among the new builds shooting up all over Spain. And Valencia doesn't miss out, in fact certain areas are at the forefront of this building surge. Today we are going to look at this phenomena and investigate what it means for neighbourhoods all over Spain but especially in Valencia.

September has started hot both in terms of the weather and the numbers of clients completing on Valencia Property they have bought and also starting their journey towards getting their own place here in Valencia. Over the last two weeks there has been a major uptick in terms of the numbers of people making their initial contact with us here at Valencia Property and enquiries for properties listed on our homepage. This might be correlated to our new publications which we are putting out on a regular basis (It may be partly because we are back off holiday too or maybe even because we fixed our forms on the website!!) On today's blog post we are looking at our new publications, our previous ones and how you can follow along as we increase those publications to satisfy your demand for reliable information.

We have written before about the rental crisis in Valencia and that continues to be an issue for many people here. Finding a long term rental is fraught with difficulty in various ways. Supply, pricing and acceptance are just three of the issues and we will talk about them today on the blog. We are also going to talk about medium term rentals and our ongoing solution to that issue, Stepping Stone Rentals, how they differ to long term rentals and what is and isn't included in both and then we'll look at short term rentals and the issues caused by Airbnb and other platforms in the housing market.

Valencia has long been celebrated as one of Europe's most progressive and welcoming cities, but what does daily life actually look like for LGBTQ+ residents? We get asked this question all the time and the truth is It's a question we always feel slightly uncomfortable answering, as no matter what we say or how much we believe Valencia to be a progressive, tolerant and safe place, at the end of the day it's always in the back of our collective minds - how would we really know?

You come to Valencia and you start existing on a diet of Paella, (or rice with things as Valencians call anything that isn't just traditional Valencian Paella with chicken, rabbit, green and white beans). Don't you? Although that was mostly true when I got here in the late 1990's, that's not the truth these days. Picture this. You're sipping morning coffee on your private terrace, gazing across the rooftops in Valencia or perhaps even the sparkling Mediterranean Sea, knowing that within a 15-minute stroll or taxi ride from your Valencia apartment, you could be dining at not one, but numerous Michelin-starred restaurants. This isn't a fantasy, this is the reality of calling Valencia home. And in today's blog we are giving you the links you need to book that enticing dinner this evening*

Over the last few weeks we have been working hard in the background which is what we do each summer while we are "On Holiday" at Valencia Property. We have put together a book, a full buying guide for getting your own Valencia Property, we have added pages and updated over 100 posts on this blog in the background while addressing issues such as links that no longer worked and more. And the latest thing we have done is to provide you with a checklist for your Valencia Relocation, a step by step guide to what you need to do and the timelines for doing it. So today we thought we would introduce it.

The first week of the summer holidays is over so of course I recorded a podcast and wrote and published a book. Yes, despite the fact that we are officially on holiday at Valencia Property, we agreed three sales last week, have been working on another over the weekend and we have just had the excellent news that a valuation on a property that we had found for one of our clients was 20% above the price they are paying for it. There's another reason to be on our insider list because it didn't even get onto the website.

We got an email on Friday morning... "Can I visit this property today?" In virtually every case that we get this mail the answer is probably "No", because that's not how things work here. Arranging visits takes time and preparation with the selling agent, the owners, timetables (as we are usually booked up well in advance) and more. However, asking that question on the 15th August, a holiday in Valencia and Spain, then you can reliably surmise that the answer will be "there is not a snowball's chance in hell of getting in to see that property today". Apart from that you have to bear in mind one thing that's quite important... we are actually closed. August isn't for visiting houses as we have mentioned before on the blog but it can be the perfect time for preparing for the Autumn rush.

If you are not a great lover of our political posts then look away now (I'm looking at you Mr Furgason*) However, if you like a bit of extremely thinly-veiled sarcasm then read on. Today I just want to do a short post of appreciation for the great leader of the Good Old US of A Donald J. Trump. Yes Donnie, I'm talking to you today. And no, this isn't going to be about your sexual predelictions, your destruction of the American political system, your inability to form a coherent sentence (The only thing you weave is your remaining few locks into the wig) or even about my favourite nickname for you the Orange Sh*tgibbon. This is simply a post thanking you Donald for helping us towards yet another record year. Yes Donnie, we are thanking you.

One of the things we love about working in the Valencia Property market is that our job is never the same from one day to the next. We get a wide variety of clients from all over the World looking at a wide range of prices and a vast array of different styles of property. This means that every day is different as we have discussed on the podcast which you can hear here. The thing that drew me towards writing about this was when I looked at the homepage the other day and the properties we had there and then compared that to a UK based site as I am currently helping my dad to sell his property in the UK and to search for another one. Sometimes you can get absolutely sick and tired of looking at bricks and there is nothing else apart from bricks and mortar in the UK market. How can you write something interesting about something that has few redeeming features? I guess thtis is why property descriptions in the UK are so bland and vanilla.

Last week we announced our new project "Stepping Stone Rentals". The interest from both owners of properties and tenants has been off the scale since. We have already identified or been given a lot of properties to be used for the project and we already have people wanting to start their three month rentals as soon as the 1st of July! (We need to get a move on) We have also had a lot of interest from people wanting to buy a property to include in the project. So today we are going to look at the process of buying your Stepping Stone Rentals property and then we will look at getting it ready for medium term tenants which is useful for those of you already with a 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.