With many Spanish Estate Agents find the going tough as we head into the spring market, traditionally a high point in property sales expectations, many spanish agents are supplementing their income with managing villa rentals while the sales market flounders.
The Spanish Property MLS has even supplemented its portfolio to include a specialist site for villa […]

There are some great sayings in real estate. One that stays with me in times of depressed markets is that ‘a home is worth what some-one is willing to pay for it’!
So much for the valuation models that are used by the industry if this is true. The Real estate market is governed by simple supply and demand economics. In a market as large as the US this means that whilst home loans may be depressed in California, it is not necessarily the case that the market is not buoyant elsewhere.

The major factor affecting the market on a national level is the rate of information transfer and the understanding of it. Put simply…confidence has been lost in the market due to a lack of confidence, (demand) in the market due to a mis-understanding of the news reports of an isolated section of the market…the sub-prime crisis.
Equity loans are on the up as people turn to home equity loans instead of moving.

What will it take to bring back confidence? Well you can bank on the media to start the hype just as they have preached the doom and gloom. Their inability to explain a complicated issue in more than two syllables causing widespead uncertainty works for creating hope out of a 1/4 point cut in interest rates in the same way. In any event….don’t panic….it wont take long.

It’s 2008 and the New Year holds many changes for a lot of people. Moving home is one of the biggest changes you can make in life….and one of the most stressful. Home loans in the latter part of 2007 were given out much more sparingly due to the credit crunch caused by the sub-prime collapse in the mortgage market. Property prices faltered in some states and there was a general feeling that the property market bubble may have burst.

Lots of people are putting off moving home and are turning to an equity loan to make improvements or add additions to their existing homes rather than poke a toe into the homes sales market.

Home equity loans can provide a simple way of coping with that ever-increasing family or just to bump up the amenities…a new kitchen, ROTG or similar project that will put off the need to move for a year or two until the market shows signs of rising confidence

It sounds good doesn’t it, someone out there has got so much money they can be a cash property buyer. The reality is however that these are usually people who have access to financing such that they can buy properties almost instantly, in effect making it appear like they have piles of cash sat in the bank waiting. The big advantage of being a cash buyer of properties is that you can get large discounts on property asking prices, especially where the seller needs to get their hands on the money really quick. Following the credit crisis and falling property prices some people may think it’s the wrong time to buy properties as an investment, but the fact is if you are an effective cash buyer you can get some huge discounts, more than enough to cover any residual fall in the property market. The upshot is that the canny property buyer can lock themselves into some prime properties for when the market recovers.

Living in debt can be a huge load on anyones mind, it can get to even the best of us and after all it should! There are ways to live in debt without being constantly looking over your back or thinking about who you owe money to. The thing to remember is that a managed debt is not the same as an unmanaged debt.. as long as you know whats coming in and going out each month and keep up with minimum payments then you should be okay.

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Home Improvement….I’ll say it again…. Home Improvement. Its a word I say quietly to myself in the hope that my wife doesn’t hear me! I will gladly admit that I know nothing about the subject although I can recall watching the show, Home Improvement back when I didn’t have a wife I needed to speak […]

Planswift by name, Plan and calculate swifter by nature. Thats what this software is all about. Planswift is takeoff software that can help anyone using and calculating labour and material costs from blueprints do the job quicker and more accurately without ever leaving their computer. To call it just construction estimating software though would belie […]

The Spanish Property mls which has up until now concentrated its efforts at introducing the MLS system of Real Estate transacting to the Coastal areas of Spain, is heading for Madrid.
With its Spanish version of the MLS, AMLA Casas, the Estate Agent Association is hoping to attract the domestic market Inmobiliarias in the capital by […]