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Property Prices Upsurge in 10 Autonomous Communities

(…) The annual fall in sector carries on but, more importantly, it slows down. The prices of houses keep dipping down but less sharply.

Step by step the things are changing and a slight quarterly rise has been registered in 10 out of 17 communities: The Balearic Islands (2%), the Community of Valencia (1,8%), La Rioja (1,6%), Cantabria (1,6%), The Basque Country (1,4%), Galicia (1,2%), Andalusia (0,9%), Catalonia (0,8%),  the Community of Madrid (0,5%) and Murcia (0,2%).

Castilla – La Mancha witnessed stagnation on the market (0.0%) and the 6 remaining communities depreciacion: Navarra (-1,3%), Asturias (-1,2%), Extremadura (-1%) Aragón (-0,8%), the Canary Islands (-0,8%) and Castilla and León (-0,1%).

(…) The price index for houses (IPV) issued by INE, based on data from deeds made available by notaries, went up in the third quarter of 2013 by 0.7% comparing to the second one, but decreased in annual terms by 7.9%. The last number is still large, however by 4.2 points smaller than in the second quarter (-12.1%). It is also the lowest annual drop in the last 2 years.

(…) Ana Pastor, the Minister of Development, claims that this does not mean that the housing prices reached the bottom, on the contrary to the optimistic opinion of the Minister of Economy, Luis de Guindos, who says that the touchdown has already had place on many submarkets.

(…) According to Julio Gil, the managing partner in Horizone Consulting Inmobiliario, “we enter in a stage of subtle falls in prices” and “the prices break in those regions where the adjustment was the smallest until now”.

Still, the seasonality – combined with augument in purchase by foreigners – seems to have played crucial role as “the activity in the third quarter is much more intense than in the second one”. Manuel Gandarias, the director of research in pisos.com, adds: “The rise has been absolutely unexpected in the sector, although we took into account the factors like seasonability and the fact that in summer months the sellers saw opportunities to raise prices or resist before the sales negotiations.

Fernando Encinar, the research director of idealista.com, calls for a distance to the optimistic data because there are still too few signs of the recovery. The revival will depend greatly on the real estate platforms of the financial institutions´behavior, which determines the tendency in landing – or beginning of the recovery – in 2014, as Gil says. It is worth to mention that, as INE explains, “the sales carried out by legal persons (including the financial institutions) are not part” of the real estate price statistics.

In each case, all the analysts welcome a little descent in the sector and foresee moderation in the house depreciacion.

Source: Expansión