http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/17/...78_027192.html

Interesting article about how Vultures from all over the World are now greedily picking over the bones of the Spanish property market.

Virtually all of the properties concerned are still not being utilised, but at least they should be properly managed in the meantime.

Maybe not the ideal solution, but surely better than leaving them to degenerate into worthless heaps of rubble and maybe save some of the banks from total collapse at the same time.

Desperation?
What? they wanted dollars or francs?
Cman will no doubt be losing sleep.

Suggests I should be seriously thinking about picking up a few of the bargains around here, while I still can.

There are doubts about Euro Vegas going ahead as it cannot attract investors. I said it was pie in the sky!

Doubts surrounding the project have increased during the last few months. JP Morgan is the latest to advise that the project could be archived. Last year Deutsche bank sent out a circular to it's investors saying that the project was unlikely.

http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2013/09/...12_959988.html

I always thought maybe a strange place to have it, I understand being the Capital but, im not so sure it would work there.

I may well (no, make that certainly will) be accused of reading this in too positive a light, but it seems to me to be another sign that the worst of the crisis in Spain is now over and the very, very early stages of recovery are now beginning, although it will take a very long time before unemployment starts to fall significantly and life will therefore remain extremely difficult for the least fortunate.

This passage from the article, in particular:-

Gumuzio rejects the idea that companies like his are vultures circling the moribund carcass of the Spanish economy: "I prefer to call them opportunists. They are investing in problem companies, and helping to clean up their debts. This is the first step toward recovery. Later on, the institutional funds will move in."

Rafael Powley of US consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle explains that investment funds are awash with cash after taking advantage of the collapse of the US property market and its subsequent recovery. "There are a lot of people who made a lot of money buying cheap, and want to repeat their success here."

The figures suggest that property prices in Spain may well be bottoming out. The price per square meter for office space on the Paseo de la Castellana, Madrid's upscale central thoroughfare, has been stable for a year now. At the height of the property boom, prices were 13,000 euros per square meter; the rate is around 6,500 euros. "The speculative market is always ahead of the real economy: that's how you make money," says Juan Manuel Ortega, who heads Jones Lang LaSalle's operations in Spain. He says that three years ago, most of the firm's clients were looking for advice on how to get out of Spain; "now they want us to tell them what to buy."

Time will tell. The best time to speculate is when the market has hit the bottom, though how long it will take to recover even if it has bottomed out is anybodies guess, likewise it seems that few of the benefits of any such recovery will now be falling into Spanish pockets.

Capitalist vultures will always gobble up the rotten bits, and Spanish property is rotten to the core.

I know people will jump up and down at any comparison with the UK, something I've never understood on a UK expat forum, but German and Japanese vultures have gobbled up the rotten British car industry, and the French vultures now own most of British water in the south of the country.

Russian vultures have gobbled up the German gas industry, as well as Arsenal football club.

Vultures abound in capitalism, it's a vulture culture.

Yeah, capitalist vulture b******s. Should have been more considerate and bought property at the peak, like all them good folks at the banks and estate agencies were telling us to.

Vultures? Hardly. Saviours is more like it.
The thing is, the property market floats on a sea of confidence. Take away buyers' confidence and the whole thing sinks. Property has no intrinsic value (even though it has a high production cost) and the only attribute that sets its price is whether a buyer can use it and that they think it will either retain or increase in value - the confidence aspect. If they don't think that, they'll rent rather than buy.

So what these speculative buyers are doing (apart from injecting some desperately needed capital into the spanish economy) is creating demand and increasing confidence. They have essentially set the price and that gives everyone else a point of reference to base their confidence on, too.

Of course, they could be completely wrong. In which case Spain keeps the money and they all go bust!

An(other) Alan Parsons fan, by any chance?

Depending on where you are, the value of the property is often in the land - of which there is a limited supply. However I agree that speculation drove the Spanish bubble to a large extent - there is no reason to pay €300k for a flat that could be rented for €500/month unless you think the value is going to increase. The problem was compounded in Spain because people didn't understand the euro. They assumed that when any crash came the currency would be devalued, inflation would kick in, and nominal house prices would not fall. That's the way it had always happened before, and that was why most Spanish thought that house prices in Spain would never go down. Except with the euro the Spanish government was unable to devalue.