The right time to invest in Barcelona’s real estate market?

Barcelona real estate Blog

Thursday, 11 February 2010 10:24

Many friends and clients read the news about the Spanish economy that are being published every now and then, explaining how bad things are and forecasting more difficulties for the Spanish government in getting the economy back to the growth path. For real estate lovers these bad news are actually good news. All of us know that when economy is slow buying opportunities are more frequent. So, is it really the right time to start and hunt for properties in Spain?

My answer is “it depends”. It depends where you want to buy and what kind of asset, it depends if you need bank finance or whether you are a cash buyer, it depends if you want to rent the property, renovate it or just buy, wait and sell…

It is definitely good moment to find bargains, although price in Barcelona anyway didn’t went down significantly. We don’t expect them to go down much more because we still feel that the demand for residential properties is strong, even though there are fewer buyers on the market. Ironically and is difference from other real estate markets, the overall offer of residential properties for sale didn’t increase but rather decreased. The reason for that is the special character of the Catalan real estate market and the local mentality of “when prices are going down I never sell my property, only when prices are going up…”.

This is also the reason why in the more expensive areas of the city, such as the “Zona Alta” prices almost didn’t went down while in the cheaper areas of Barcelona real estate prices were affected by the crisis.

One of the last clients of us has just invested in a beautiful big size 1 bedroom apartment (more than 70 M2), in the old city, on the Las Ramblas it self, some 300 meters from the old port of Barcelona and 10 minutes walk to Plaza Catalonia. The apartment is in a beautiful classical building that was entirely renovated. It has an elevator and great lobby/entrance hall. The apartment itself is like new and the price that was paid it 240,000€. The bank evaluation report, being done 3 days after we have reserved this apartment for him turned to be 270,000€! This kind of property was sold for 350,000€ up until a year or a year and a half ago.

I give this example not to say that prices went down sharply, because they didn’t, but rather to say that searching smartly these days we are able to find some really good investment opportunities.

Y. Meshulam
Homesearch Barcelona director.

Tags: real estate Barcelona, buy property in Bacrelona, investing in Bacrelona, market opportunities barcelona, homes barcelona, apartments for sale in Barcelona, rentals barcelona.