Oh.. come on, you live in Costa Del Sol. If only foreigners are to blame, then only Costa Del Sol should experience a housing boom..
But you pretty much refuted your own argument. You said, they build huge ghost cities outside Madrid. I never been to Madrid, but one thing I know. It is not a dream of foreigners to live in Madrid. So why did they construct so many houses? because there was a building boom based on cheap credit.
The hell I did. The cheap credit did fuel the boom, I have never denied that, but there would have never been a boom if there was no demand.. and that demand was in large part because of non-Spanish. Now that the building companies got greedy and deluded to think that Germans would want to live inland some where does not mean that one of the main drivers of prices across the country was Brits and Germans and so on.
And yes, the number is correct. While there are 250-350K british people in Spain. They do not have 250-350K homes. The number of houses according to this source is 1.5 million
Ciudadanos Europeos I would assume no more than 1 million were built the last decade. That is not going to massively increase house prices all over Spain.
Seriously.. is that your source? So 1.6 million homes owned by non Spanish, plus how many millions owned by tourism companies to rent out during the tourism season? You do realize that Spain is the second biggest tourist destination after France on the planet right? 30 million people visit Spain each year, and 10 million of those approx on the Costa del Sol. You can not tell me that an industry that caters for 30% of GDP (tourism) does not impact prices on housing and other goods. We have whole complexes here owned by management complexes that rent out to tourists... and there is a lot of those.
Sadly there are very few reliable statistics on foreign home ownership in Spain.
You ask about why home ownership is 80%. I can tell you why it is so high. It is because of rent control and the difficulty of evicting tenants, which limits the amount of properties for rent. When they say 80% home ownership, they mean 20% rent their property. There is no way to classify if a person living with his parents wants to live with his parents.
LOL....Even your own so called source states that 80% number is for older people and the number falls the younger you get. As for evicting tenants.. yea it is not easy, but it aint easy in any country... you need to do your legal work.
Then why do you confirm my arguments? The fact that the irresponsible building boom was not exclusive to Costa Del Sol, proves my argument that easy credit was the cause.
Never said it did not have a factor.. but cheap credit or not, the building companies would not build unless there was some sort of demand. And at those prices it did not come from the locals and that only leaves foreigners and the tourism industry. Had there not been the external factor, then the demand would have been "natural" and not created any where near the boom that was created.. because the buyers had limited funds. Now the Brits and Germans did not have limited funds (relatively) and wanted homes.. and that drove up prices because there was demand.
And you agree with my solution, to build public housing and sell them to any Spanish person who is not rich.
Not BUILD, but nationalise.. they have a 1 million homes rotting, so why the hell build more? It is not like they are in the middle of no where these homes, they are just not priced correctly for Spaniards and are unattractive for northern European holiday goers.
If they combined this with limits on credit to households and corporations,
LOL you dont listen... the main Spanish banks are healthy and have been through out the crisis. That is because they did in fact limit lending relatively to non Spanish banks. It was Barcleys and co that gave out 110% mortgages (and STILL do lol)... Where the banks, especially the CAJAs went wrong, was to the corporations. Nepotism and local corruption fed these companies with cheap credit, and that has killed off quite a few CAJAs and forced them to merge. But they still only account for a small % the total banking industry.
and removed their dumb rent laws.
Oh you mean the rent control on some buildings? Sure, but that wont do jack**** for the market. Rent prices have fallen a lot the last 5 years. Spain is an example of the free market going nuts.. there was not controls and regulation which in turn meant prices could be pressed up easily. No one asked questions when permits were given out, or people just built without.. and no one asked questions when Russians and motorcycle gangs and the like came and bought up masses of land and houses with northern European and Eastern European prostitution, drug and gun money.
Then property prices would decline, it would be easier to find a cheap place to rent and the building boom would have been limited.
Property prices have been declining.. but there is still demand for homes in the sun. Now the areas where prices have fallen the most are areas where there is no one from abroad that want to live...The problem is that the building companies and banks are sitting on a ton of homes and waiting for better prices that will never come. If they release them on the market, then the prices will drop dramatically.. but the building companies refuse to do that as long as the government keeps them solvent. The banks have written off most of the bad debt any ways.
Hence, unemployment would not be 25%.
Spanish unemployment has always been high even during the boom times. Fraud is considerable. Hence the 25%.. well 23.6%, is an inflated number.
But also, one thing that many forget... debt follows you, so you might get evicted from your home, and the home sold, but you still owe the money. That is VERY different than in most countries, including the US where you can basically walk away from debt. It is something they have to address here.
Any ways I tire of this and need food.. we cant agree, so lets agree to disagree on most points until we can find reliable statistics.
