Expert: Don’t buy property in Spain
An expert has advised against buying property in Spain, investors in Brazil real estate may be interested to learn.
Paul Bradley, spokesperson for the Spanish Property Owners Guild, says the values on properties in the country in 2004-5 will take "decades" to return.
"There are over 600,000 unsold properties at the moment [and] I personally wouldn’t buy any of them until values stop going down," advises Mr Bradley.
He also warned against looking for run-down properties being sold on the cheap, saying these involve "not only distressed owners but also distressed legal paperwork".
Mr Bradley says it is now expensive to live in the country, with pensioners who emigrated years ago currently finding it difficult to exist on UK pensions.
In December 2008, Spain’s Insititute of National Statistics reported that the annual variation rate in the country’s house price index was -3.0 per cent in the third quarter of the year, a decline of 2.7 percentage points compared to the previous period.
