There was another program of the 'illegal homes' and rip-offs in Spain variety the other evening. You should see the comments from - presumably - unhappy home-owners...
BBC Watchdog: 'spanish Dreams Reduced to Rubble'

Well if you follow the posters on this forum all those commentators must be lying Everything is great.

Seriously, anyone who buys a home on the spanish costas now is a bun short of a dozen!

Well we are on a Spanish Costa, Costa Tropical, over seven years here and yes all is great. Ok we bought an older Spanish house and definately not a bun short of a dozen.

Most posters here are happy with their lot, some are not, but hey ho lots of rose tinted glasses put there

Fortune favours the brave, as I remember well from the last Spanish recession.
Those who have the bottle to dive in and buy in desperate times of little confidence,uncertainty and markets getting towards bottoming out with low prices are generally those who will make a killing.
Same applies to many aspects of investment and business opportunities.
Looking back in hindsight for those who missed the boat, it can then become much clearer who was a bun short of a dozen....Seriously!

Yes we did well out of the last recession. Bought a villa and two apartments. Made around 300% on the apartments...sold at the top of the market, thank God However the last recession didn't have thousands of illegal properties hanging about! Fortune may favour the brave but not the stupid!

I can assure you there were thousands of illegal properties around back then, many of which strictly peaking are still illegal today.
In addition I came across many with no escrituras at all, plus lots more that had embargoes slapped on them which took many years to sort out.

Interesting - will there be a tipping point (I'm sure it's not now, but maybe in a couple of years) when the prices hit a bottom, and then a new wave of buyers move in? Or can we safely say people won't buy holiday homes on the Costas again? I'm not sure any of us can be 100% sure.

Be careful though - it seems that if you default on Spanish mortgage payments, the banks can take your UK property

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...iday-flat.html

Not much sympathy from me I'm afraid.

That will no doubt scare a lot of ppl. half to death, having thought they were on safe ground, after returning to the UK.

So many ppl. just don't seem able to apply a little basic common sense to their financial affairs these days, and end up sticking their necks out far too far, without considering the possibility of a future recession or more difficult times for a host of other reasons.

At the end of the day they need to remember that Bankers still Rule, and will always insist on their pound of flesh, or quite a bit more, at the end of the day.

no sympathy here either.

holiday home will be repo d, sold in an auction attended by errr, the bank managers brother, & the shortfall chased, plus costs.

some of the current prices in Spain would clear out most UK homes.

It may have been a foolish risk to take on two homes (why wasn't the UK mortgage paid down over the 20 years?) but I still feel some sympathy. Losing one house may be unlucky - losing two must be a real kick in the teeth. How do you come back from that?

it's tough & I do feel for them, but I prefer to see the sum negative equity of repos being targeted at the perpetrators, not smeared across the whole tax paying community.

Banks are businesses & are already v expensive.

I do feel sympathy for people in that situation. Who could have forecast what happened in October, 2007? The best brains in the world missed it.

Had it not happened, people would have carried on paying their mortgages and enjoying life, as they had intended when they bought their second home in Spain – and we’re not talking about palaces here, just a little holiday flat where the mortgage could have been paid instead of paying for a couple of expensive hotel holidays every year.

I don't understand the situation with these two.

They had a 140k mortgage in Spain and a 250k mortgage in the UK. They say they couldn't afford the payments but with the lower interest rates the payments must have gone down considerably over the last year.

They are both employed as paramedics so their income will not have gone down.

A bit odd?