Tag: Costa del Sol

Recovery Has Investors Stocking Up On Spanish Malls

11 February 2015 – WSJ

The Spanish shopping experience is getting a multibillion-dollar makeover as the nation’s economy improves and foreign investment flows in.

After a year of tepid recovery from recession, consumer spending is picking up. Retail sales rose 1.9% in November from the same month in 2013, the fourth consecutive monthly increase, after six years of decline. Although nearly a quarter of the workforce remains unemployed, the economy is expected to expand by 1.7% this year, compared with 1.1% in the euro area as a whole, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That, in turn, is helping to fuel investment in the retail property sector. In all, investment in retail real estate totalled €3.34 billion ($3.78 billion) in 2014, nearly triple the amount of the previous year and topping the record of €3.1 billion in 2006, according to property consultant JLL, formerly known as Jones Lang LaSalle. At least 67% of investments came from outside Spain. There was more investment in retail than in any other class of commercial real estate over the past year, according to JLL.

International investors are expected to pump more money into retail properties this year, including new construction, according to Adolfo Ramirez Escudero, president of property consultant CBRE Group Inc. in Spain.

Much of the money will go toward large-scale projects that mix shopping and entertainment, known as retail resorts, as well as outdoor outlet malls that resemble small cities where shoppers can find discounted designer brands.

Developers see opportunities for strong returns because prices of land and buildings are still depressed six years after the financial crisis. With the prices of many commodities at relatively lower levels and Spain’s unemployment so high, builders can also construct projects at a reduced cost. Meanwhile, the number of tourists to Spain is at a record, bringing with them money to spend.

The entrance of big global investors is a sign that the Spanish market is stabilizing, said Pedro de Churruca, general director of JLL in Spain.

“People are clearly coming back to shopping centers as a consequence of higher disposable income,” said Ismael Clemente of Merlin Properties Socimi SA, Spain’s largest real-estate investment trust, which in July purchased Marineda City shopping center in La Coruña from a local developer for €260 million. The three-year-old retail complex is the second-largest in the country.

The shopping center opened “in probably the worst possible moment in Spain,” said Mr. Clemente, referring to Spain’s economic doldrums. “We saw that there was a clear upward movement expected in rent, so we thought it was an interesting bet.”

The U.K.’s Intu Properties PLC purchased Spain’s largest shopping center, Puerto Venecia in Zaragoza, for €451 million in December. The British real-estate investment trust also announced a partnership with Spanish developer Eurofund to build four more retail resorts in Spanish cities as part of a plan to invest £1.2 billion ($1.8 billion) over 10 years.

Construction on the first of these projects, Intu Costa del Sol in the Malaga suburb of Torremolinos, —is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2015 and be completed by 2018. The 1.9-million-square-foot development will include amenities Intu is known for: a minitheme park, a surf lake, artificial ski slopes and a gourmet market, as well as shops and restaurants of high-end chains.

Intu owns 18 U.K. shopping centers, but Spain is the company’s first international market, which it entered in 2013 with the purchase of Parque Principado shopping center in Oviedo.

“We’re keen to keep growing, and if we focus on the prime, best shopping centers in the market, there are few opportunities in the U.K.,” said Martin Breeden, regional director of Intu. “Spain is a market that seemed open to international investment and where, frankly, there are not a lot of good shopping resorts in existence.”

Intu has purchase options on land for similar developments in Valencia, Vigo and Palma de Mallorca.

The Intu Costa del Sol site is about 3 miles from Malaga’s most-visited shopping center, Plaza Mayor, which opened in 2002. Sonae Sierra of Portugal, which owns and manages Plaza Mayor, has joined with U.K.-based McArthurGlen Group and U.S.-based Simon Property Group Inc. to expand the 572,400-square-foot shopping area to include a designer outlet mall. The €115 million development will add 324,000 square feet of leasable area and be the first large-scale outlet mall in Andalusia. Construction is scheduled to begin in the second half of this year, and the first phase is set to open in 2017.

Joan Jove, McArthurGlen’s regional development director, said Plaza Mayor is a “very strong, established retail scheme” and the planned adjacent outlet mall will be one-of-a-kind in the region. Mr. Jove said the project is mainly targeted at the 10 million tourists who visit Costa del Sol each year.

Intu’s Mr. Breeden said he wasn’t concerned about competition. “We’re very confident that there will be fantastic demand for our project.”

Sonae Sierra said it also plans to spend €55 million to update four of its other shopping centers around Spain within the next five years.

Elsewhere, TIAA-CREF, a U.S. money manager, has formed a joint venture with Neinver, a Spanish outlet-mall developer, to create TH Real Estate, which will own properties in Spain and other countries. Among their projects is the €80 million Viladecans The Style Outlets in Barcelona, which is scheduled to open in 2016.

“There is still plenty of money chasing product, and plenty of people with big debt who want to sell product,” said CBRE’s Mr. Ramirez. “I expect big volume this year.” He said large transactions could start to level off by next year as prices increase.

Original story: WSJ (by Shaheen Samavati)

Edited by: Carmel Drake

Housing In 2015: More Sales And Higher Prices

9 February 2015 – Expansión

Forecasts / This year the construction sector will emerge from negative numbers in all of the major indicators.

If 2014 was the turning point for the housing market, then it looks like 2015 will be the year 1 a.c (after the crisis). After seven years of hell, the residential sector is seeing the light again with positive data across all of the key indicators. That is the main conclusion drawn from the 21st Edition of the Real Estate Heart Rate Monitor (la XXI edición del Pulsímetro Inmobiliario), which will be published by the Institute of Business Practice (el Instituto de Práctica Empresarial or IPE) in the next few days.

The report has been prepared by MAR Real Estate, the real estate arm of IPE, in collaboration with the Network of Qualified Property Consultants (la Red de Asesores Inmobiliarios Cualificados) (around 600 professionals from all over Spain have participated in the study). And their predictions indicate that a period of great prosperity is upon us: sales, prices, mortgage lending, construction, stock…everything will improve in 2015. From low levels, yes, and still with limited strength, but this can only be good news when we are talking about the impoverished residential market, where the metastasis has been more devastating than in any other sector.

There is a great atmosphere. To begin with, sales will increase by 7.5% this year, having closed 2014 with an increase of 2.6%, the first rise since 2010, the year in which the market was shaken by the removal of tax relief for buying a first home. According to MAR Real Estate’s forecasts, 344,000 residential properties will be bought and sold in 2015; 24,000 more than last year (320,063).

The second major indicator in the residential world is price, the eternal purchase thermometer. According to IPE’s report, house prices rose by 6.47% last year and are expected to increase by a further 2.5% in 2015. The average value of homes sold in 2014 was €141,718 and this year is expected to be €145,261, showing a return to 2012 levels.

Price rises

“The trend is rising, something which is evidenced by the fact that the vulture funds have now left Spain”, says José Antonio Pérez, Director of Real Estate at IPE. “The properties being sold are those in good locations, in prime areas that are nicely finished and ready to live in. Speculative purchases have practically disappeared”, he adds.

Furthermore, a phenomenon not seen since the years before the Great Crisis is now happening: homes are being sold off plan and prices are rising during the purchase process.

There are two examples that illustrate this. Both are on the Costa del Sol, which analysts regard as the area where the trends in the rest of the housing market are first seen (that was the case in the 1980s and 1990s and it is starting to be the case again now). In Estepona, the British company Taylor Wimpey put a development containing 44 properties up for sale. Off plan. They now have only three loft apartments left to sell – the original asking price for these properties was around €400,000….and they are now being sold for €500,000. A 25% increase. The majority of its customers, are foreign (around 85%-90%).

The second example is that of Inmobiliaria Sur, which has a strong position in the domestic market, away from luxury properties. To the extent that it has been putting homes up for sale – also off plan – in its developments in Marbella and Mijas-Costa, the prices of the best properties that it has not yet sold have increased from between €200,000-€220,000 to reach close to €300,000.

“In prime areas, prices are rising. In mid-market areas, prices will be stable in 2015 and in the areas that still have a lot of surplus, there will be further price decreases”, says Pérez.

In other words: good properties have already been sold; but structural stock, born out of the excesses of the real estate bubble, has not. In the case of the former, bargaining power has decreased, although there are still bargains to be had; in the case of the latter, there is simply no demand, aside from investors looking to obtain yields from their properties, or to renovate them and wait for better times. “Buy-to-let homes will continue to generate good returns and so money will continue to move from the financial system into the real estate market in 2015”, predicts José Antonio Pérez.

There are potential buyers in the market, but they cannot obtain access to credit. Experts believe that natural demand in Spain would generate around 400,000 transactions (per year), but it will be a while before we see that figure again, especially given that the construction of new homes is clearly following a downwards curve. The return to sustainable figures will depend heavily on financial institutions opening the mortgage tap, which is currently shut off to ordinary mortals, i.e. to anyone that does not fall into the vague category of “solvent”.

Mortgages

According to Pérez, we are now seeing a rise in the number of loans being granted for property purchases, but lending is still scarce. In 2014, 299,064 mortgages were signed, which is 2.3% fewer than in 2013, but we expect to see the first increase in nine years in 2015, with 306,639 mortgages being signed for urban properties. In 2006, the last year in which an increase was recorded, that figure stood at 1,816,878, i.e. 592% higher.

“The mortgage market will continue to be very restricted in 2015, very focused on the products that are marketed by the banks themselves”, says Pérez. Moreover, “two thirds of sales will be paid for in cash”, he adds.

The average mortgage size grew by 15.8% in 2014 (from €113,972 to €131,984) and will increase by 3.4% in 2015 to reach €136,447. The volume of these loans will increase by 6% to take total mortgage borrowing to €41,840 million by the end of the year.

One question remains unanswered: if everything is going to start growing again, will the cranes return to Spain’s urban landscape? And the answer is yes. Very slowly at first, but yes. In 2015, 40,255 new homes will be constructed, i.e. 7.5% more than in 2014.

Original story: Expansión (by Juanma Lamet)

Translation: Carmel Drake

The Stock Of New Homes Will Fall By 29% In 2015

9 February 2015 – Expansión

The over-supply of properties is decreasing / The number of unsold new homes will decrease from 662,761 in 2014 to 469,700 in 2015.

The puncture in the paroxysm of greed that was the real estate bubble, left a never-ending mummified trail, a sea of properties strewn haphazardly across the country and without exception. In 2008, when the economy crashed, a squirrel could have crossed Spain from Tarifa to Cadaqués jumping from empty home to empty home. Not anymore. Or not through so many empty new homes at least. The stock of new residential property for sale is decreasing significantly, although in absolute terms the number is still high.

That is the view of the 21st Edition of the Real Estate Heart Rate Monitor (XXI edición del Pulsímetro Inmobiliario) published by the Institute of Business Practices (el Instituto de Práctica Empresarial or IPE). The surplus of homes declined in 2014, for the fourth consecutive year, from 777,000 in 2013 to 662,761. In other words, by approx. 115,000 homes or 14.7% of the total.

Furthermore, the decrease will be even greater in 2015. According to the IPE’s forecasts, the figure will drop down to 469,708 residential properties this year, i.e. 29.7% fewer than in 2014. In other words, almost one third of the stock will have vanished in just 12 months. As many as 193,000 homes.

The over-supply of homes reached its peak in 2010, when the developments that had been started in 2008 were completed – residential construction is a process that tends to take around two years. In 2010, the surplus stock amounted to 931,615 homes, slightly less than twice the number of new, empty homes that will be on the market in 10 months time in Spain (note, stock does not include second-hand homes).

Once again in 2014, Valencia was the autonomous region with the highest number of phantom residential properties and the only one to have more than 100,000. This region, which is heavily influenced by coastal second homes, closed 2014 with a stock of 163,098 units, which will decrease by 27.5% in 2015, down to 118,196, according to the forecasts released by MAR Real Estate and the IPE. Valencia accounts for no less than one in four of all surplus properties, i.e. 25% of the total.

It is followed by Castilla-La Mancha, an unequivocal symbol of the legacy of the years of over-heating, which is expected to have 72,944 homes by December (2015), down 13.6% from a year earlier.

The third autonomous region is Andalucía, which is expected to have 59,563 empty homes by the end of the year, i.e. 41% fewer than in 2014 – not for nothing, the Costa del Sol is beginning to recover. These three regions alone account for 54% of the total stock.

Experts predict that the highest reductions in the over-supply of property will take place in the Community of Madrid and Cataluña, where they expect the figures to decrease by half, i.e. from 27,618 to 13,809 in the case of the former; and from 25,353 to 12,676 in the case of the latter.

“New homes are already being built in Madrid and Barcelona because some areas have been left with very little stock”, says José Antonio Pérez, Director of Real Estate at IPE. However, there are other provinces, especially those in the East “with a large quantity of homes that are going to be hard to sell”, due to the vast number of properties that are suffering from a double hangover: that of the bubble and that of the nearby sea”.

Original story: Expansión (by Juanma Lamet)

Translation: Carmel Drake

CTH Capital Awarded ‘Golf Hills Village’ Complex In Estepona

21 January 2015 – El Mundo

The complex has 152 homes, with a total surface area of 14,762 square metres.

It is a particularly attractive asset for international developers and investors.

The company CTH Capital has been awarded the residential complex ‘Golf Hills Village’ through an auction organised by the property consultant BNP Paribas Real Estate. The property, located in Estepona, in the area known as Selwo, has 152 newly built homes. In total, the above ground surface area occupies 14,762 square metres.

“Transactions such as this one highlight the growing interest in the Spanish real estate sector from international investors. In this sense, the Costa del Sol has a clear advantage since it is a landmark tourist destination and also benefits from high quality infrastructure”, says CBRE, a company that advised CTH Capital in its purchase of the complex.

The auction was conducted through sealed bids in the presence of a notary and had the distinction of being the first in Spain of an asset under construction. Nevertheless, the building work at the complex is in the advanced phase, with more than 95% of the basic project now complete.

An attractive asset for international investors

“As we explained during the presentation of the auction, the characteristics of this asset made it particularly attractive for international developers and investors, which has been proven at the close”, says Irene Valbuena, Head of Auctions at BNP Paribas Real Estate. “Furthermore, the transaction confirms the interest of international investors in Spanish assets and shows how they are adopting value-added strategies to enter into our market, such as in this case, where the construction work still needs to be completed”.

CTH Capital is dedicated to the management and investment of real estate, and is based in London, UK. The company specialises in direct investments with a special focus on investments in hotels and second homes.

CTH Capital has made its investment under a joint venture with the property developer and constructor, JAMSA, which has more than 40 years of experience developing property in Spain and overseas (Dominican Republic, Florida, Romania).

Original story: El Mundo

Translation: Carmel Drake

Housing Sector To Improve Region To Region RECOVERY / Large Cities Are Initiating The Climb Out Of The Crisis

26/12/2014 – Expansión

Housing recovery will be asymmetrical, as it is in the real estate market — experts and industry players are convinced. Areas where fewer new homes remain unsold and price adjustments have been significant will take less time to return to normal levels than in the more built-up provinces.

What happens in big cities is often a leading indicator of the coming trend. And in Madrid, housing price adjustment has been more than 40% and things are starting to move again in the real estate market. That is, investors have already become more active, considering that home value drop will not deepen much further. The same thing is happening in Barcelona and major cities in the Basque country. The surprise is that real estate consultants and economists already see the light at the end of the tunnel in Mediterranean tourist destinations such as the Costa del Sol – which always falls and recovers before the average of other Spanish regions – and parts of Levante, the eastern coast.

Specifically, there are already 20 provinces that are on the road to recovery, after seven years of continuous descent. This is much better than the 2013 scenario, in which only eight provinces were showing signs of improvement. This was noted in a report by Deloitte in which the exit speed of the real estate crisis is measured by region.

According to the study, the Spanish provinces with the best real estate score are in order as follows: Madrid, Álava, Barcelona, Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Navarra, Cantabria, Zaragoza, Lleida, Baleares, Segovia, Valencia, Asturias, Huesca, Burgos, Valladolid, Palencia and Soria. That is to say, these are the regions where the real estate market will see the greatest recovery, i.e. more and more cranes, construction projects and mortgage subrogation will begin to pop up.

On the opposite end, Almería, Ciudad Real, Toledo and Castellón will take the longest to recover, “due to both their worse relative position in macroeconomic terms and weaker real estate sector activity, heavily penalized by oversupply.” Yes, it is remarkable that this tail-end has shrunk from having 21 provinces in 2012 to only four this year. The remaining areas (25 provinces) are at a midpoint, meaning they will recover in ‘a second phase’”.

It is also important to note that 18 of the 20 provinces that will get out of the housing crisis early are situated in the North. The other two are the Balearic Islands and Valencia (see chart). And none of the southern provinces will recover in the first of the three exit phases of the housing crisis that Deloitte has set. “The North will climb out of the crisis faster than the South, since it is not so contingent upon tourism. Furthermore, in the North, urban residential development has not been as significant as in the South,” said the Director of Deloitte Real Estate, Javier Garcia-Mateo.

The regions with the highest housing stock are Valencia (164,000 homes), Andalusia (102,500) and Castilla-La Mancha (83,700). Together, these three regions account for more than half the housing surplus at the end of 2014, according to the Real Estate Institute Business Practice Pulsometer, which estimates the stock of unsold new homes at the end of 2014 at 652,000, 14.8% less than in 2013. On the opposite side, Extremadura (3,238), Navarra (3,854) and Baleares (7,965) have the lowest number of homes remaining unsold. Catalonia has a surplus of 12,977 homes, less than half that of Madrid (27,198).

Original article: Expansión

Translation: Aura REE