A while ago, I commented on sales commissions for estate agents in Spain. At the time, what I had no space for was a critical warning to any buyer of Spanish property to be very careful about ‘buyer’s premiums’. ‘Buyer’s premiums’, over the years, have been nothing if not contentious – not least because invariably they have taken unwary foreign [...]
Of course, there is no denying that the Spanish property market is in deep trouble. Indeed, the problems caused by the Spanish property crash are, undeniably, central to the ‘crisis’ in Spain. Quite simply (as everyone now knows) far too many properties in Spain were built during the boom years. To compound this fact, promoters were lent absurd amounts of [...]
Last week, I noticed an article in a major UK daily paper commenting upon the fact that estate agent’s commissions in Spain are ‘much higher than in Britain’. Indeed, the article pointed out that an ‘agent selling a property in Spain could earn up to five per cent of the sale value’. I doubt that I was alone amongst expatriots [...]
It is, of course, no secret that the banks in Spain are now the biggest owners of property in Spain. Naturally, this is not something that they welcome and, as a consequence, several have their own estate agencies (for example, Mediterráneo for the CAM bank and Habitat for Bancaja) to dispose of these properties. The question is whether, as a [...]