All the latest news from Valencia Property

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.

Now as you know we always tell you the great things to look forward to on moving to Valencia and Spain but you should also know about those little things that will annoy you when you get here, or shall we say may annoy you because not all of these things will be relevant to everyone and also there may be other things that annoy you specifically even more. Nevertheless we thought it was time to tell you about all of those things that make life in Valencia and Spain less ideal, the sub-optimal things about living here. Are you ready? Then read on

Decarbonising the electricity grid is an important step towards helping to at least mitigate the worst effects of climate change, I won't say to save the planet but we may be able to make things a little less worse in the future. One of the main steps we can take is by moving to more renewables in our use of electricity and in Spain we are moving forward quickly more than most other countries. Spain has an abundance of renewable power sources with the main ones being solar (of course) hydro and wind but as you will see later there's a wide mix of sources.

The annual Numbeo macrostudy of international destinations for factors such as cost of living, quality of life and more has just dropped and guess what.. Valencia rocks. Valencia has rocketed into the top five cities in the World for quality of life from number 70 last year and it ranks highly on every metric in the study**. Numbeo takes data from people actually living in the places they study to give an up to date ranking for everything from local salaries to interest rates and even the price of a pint of milk, or litre perhaps. So kudos to The Hague, Eindhoven, Luxembourg and Rotterdam for ranking above Valencia but let me know about the temperature and sunlight there in January (And even in June) then we can talk.

If you want to go native when buying Valencia Property you need to know what makes for the perfect property for your average Valencian. This is why certain properties sell very quickly compared with others. If they correspond to what a Valencian wants then it is likely to get sold quicker because then there are more potential clients in the market. Now of course you don't need to go native when you are looking for a place, the following might not be in your list of must haves for your perfect place (You can send us yours by filling in the form on this post). However, to get to know the local market a bit more, this is what Valencians want*

We have talked before about the rental crisis in the market in Valencia and we have told you that you will have limited options on your purchase if you are clear about what you want because there will never be more than a handful of options available to you at any one time. What if we told you though that those options are reducing even further? And because of this we will now give you the most convincing case ever for using a buyer’s agent?

It's March now and as you walk around Valencia you become a cat on a hot tin roof as you get to learn the words "bombetas", "petardos" and "tracas" and they burn into your mind with all the "fun" of Fallas. All the roads start to get sealed off as they are blocked by huge tents, churros stalls and fenced off areas for kids to start their inevitable journey towards the three fingered handshake, and you wish that you didn't have a cat or dog in your household (Valencian cats and dogs just get used to it I suppose)

Year on year we get more American clients coming to Valencia (We get a lot of Canadians too). The system for buying a property in the States and Canada is very different to Spain so expectations have to be managed before and during a property search. Not only about the process of buying a property though, also about money transfers, where to find information, who and what to trust online and a whole lot more. As a result we find ourselves explaining the same things over and over so thought it was time to put these things into a post which we can refer people to right from the start. Some of these things are important for everyone coming to live in Spain though, especially the first point, so it's worth a read for everyone. Oh and there are eleven not ten... and a bonus ball extra for all of you Facebook fans out there.