Rob Horgan
APARTMENT sales are soaring across Spain but rural holiday homes remain empty and unwanted.
In the past 12 months, 80% of all properties sold in Spain were flats and apartments, up 28% on the previous year.
This has led leading property developer Taylor Wimpey to declare ‘The rural holiday villa’s days are numbered’.
“Buyers are much more discerning than they used to be when it comes to property type and location,” said Marc Pritchard, Sales & Marketing Director at Taylor Wimpey España.
“Remote, isolated villas are falling out of favour as second homeowners’ demands have changed.”
Re Taylor Wimpy: I can see nothing for him to be grinning and smiling about..Thousands of UK ex pats bought country properties, hoping for a quiet’ish retirement, what we don’t want is a grinning yuppie gloating over the thousands of pounds we have lost, and the thousands he is making selling property off cheap.
Please have some sense of decency.
Hold on to your burger there, wimpy guy. Did I just read that folks buying tacky condos, in crowded, crackerbox Costa high-rises: “.. are much more discerning than..” people who invest in complete homes, in traditional villages, and the serene countryside? I always thought it was lack of discernment that kept the mass-produced junk flying off the shelves of the discount stores.
Leave it to the folks who brought us Centerpoint (unoccupied from completion in 1966 until 1975), and the Sizewell B nuclear plant (home of all those pesky emergency shutdowns) to know what makes a cherished home, and a sustaining value. Wimpy guy’s right, we don’t have anything like those attractions out here in the “.. Remote, isolated..” boonies.
Does anyone take Taylor Wimpy comments seriously……
Sad to say that remotely located second homes are’nt selling either in Spain or France. A lot of people have woken up to the fact that as you get older you need facilities like – a selection of s/markets, doctors, district nurses,hospitals near to hand not 30/40 minutes drive away and what happens if you can’t drive any more due to ill health.
Only other foreigners want these out-of-the-way homes if anyone does. Rural France is heaving with these types of homes for sale and they are far better built and renovated than the Spanish ones. Many Brits who lived all their lives in the big city simply cannot handle the ‘silence’. Some Brits have been trying to sell these types of homes for 4-5 years and lowered their prices upto 40% but still can’t sell.
If these rural homes were really good buys then foreigners would’nt get a look-in, would they – caveat emptor, as always.
Marc Pritchard often talks up TW’s sales on new developments but never mentions that there are so many 2nd hand TW properties for sale even in competition over the new ones and so many at reduced prices, in other words they all fell in price so some investment they turned out to be, not!
Los Arqueros for example has it’s own owners re-sales section with a huge choice of properties.