Where once my daughter and I shared a joke about new estate agent offices popping up like mushrooms now they appear to be dropping like flies. As every whitewashed locale window was eventually polished clean to reveal a shiny new property agent, we raised eyebrows and wished for a My Little Pony shop instead. Well she did, I secretly wanted an English book shop.
I wondered at the time how our relatively small town could support them all. Of course estate agents in Tenerife are neither restricted to the towns that house their office nor to Tenerife itself. Many are simply based here and offer services in Fuerteventura, the other Canary Islands, mainland Spain and forays into the Cape Verde property market but still when you have several estate agent offices cheek by jowl in a small local town you do have to wonder if there is enough money flying around to sustain them all.
And it would now seem that there is not. Despite trumpeting rally cries about it being a buyer’s market and Miguel ángel Fernández Ordónez, head honcho of the Bank of Spain comfortingly assuring us that Spain will almost certainly squeak through without a recession, buyers are understandably cautious.
On the one hand there are fantastic bargains to be made – just at the back of me there is a nice little two bedroom house with garden that has dropped €20,000 in the last week. It was not overpriced to begin with. Another property I spotted in La Estrella went from €180.000 to €140.000 just recently and indications are that prices will continue to fall.
On the other hand, potential buyers are being advised to keep an eye on the Euribor which today is standing at 5.454%. As that continues to rise, so do your mortgage repayments.
All the more necessary then, to find a solid, professional and experienced estate agent to guide you through the mine field of potential pitfalls to the crock of property investment gold that lies at the other side. I’ve no doubt those that have the experience and local knowledge will weather the current storm of estate agent closures and that the property market place will be all the healthier for that.
Find some of the Tenerife’s most experienced English speaking estate agents on eTenerife.com as well as property agents for Fuerteventura and Cape Verde.
I think this hard-hitting crunch will be a good thing for filtering out those agents in Tenerife who leech a living through unscrupulous and unprofessional practises – and there are quite a few like that. When we emerge at the other side of this property recession squeaky and clean, only the best agents will remain.
I couldn’t agree more Joe. I hope that the recession also saves a few naive punters from having the money to throw away on fraudulent timeshare and holiday clubs too.