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Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything

• TheGallopedHigh 6y ago
  There are more properties available in Italy that would not likely require 200k button the order of 10s of thousands. Maybe that’s your ticket?
  • ido 6y ago
    Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k. People here say these are remote but that is really mostly just how "spoiled" (in quotes because I'm "spoiled" that way too!) Germans are with commute. You can be 1 hour drive away (including traffic) from many fairly central places in Berlin & have very cheap housing outside the city (partially this is because traffic is actually not that bad in Berlin & partially because it's in the middle of an otherwise fairly empty & large plain[0]). In comparison nowhere within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap, nor from SF/LA/NYC or heck even Tel Aviv. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain
    • ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      >Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k Do you have any examples? I could never find anything larger than a matchbox in a village for under $200k in Germany. Anything decent I found in the outskirts of any big city was over 500k.
      • ido 6y ago
        The first thing is to look in places without good transit as germans (reasonably!) prefer those. The moment it requires owning a car anything outside Berlin (so in Brandenburg) will be affordable. Here's a quick search for houses under €100k with at least 100m^2 and 3 rooms (2BR) in Brandenburg: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/brandenburg/guenstiges-haus-kaufen?numberofrooms=3.0-&livingspace=100.0- https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/brandenburg/guenst... It returns 83 results & while not all of them are within 1 hour drive from Berlin, at least a bunch of them are. Also if you're in the affluent south or west of the country (which I suspect is where you searched?) you will have far fewer options for cheap housing than in the depopulated former East-Germany around Berlin. You definitely can't repeat this "trick" outside of Munich.
        • ChuckNorris89 6y ago
          No offense, but those places are cheap because nobody wants to live there and for good reason. It looks much worse than Eastern Europe. Nobody in their right mind would want their kids growing up there. In family friendly places with jobs the properties are far from cheap.
          • ido 6y ago
            That's why I don't live there! But the topic we're attached to is "1-Euro Houses" and that's exactly the kind of places you'd find these in Italy or Spain as well - depressed rural/small-towns with no jobs and where all the young people moved to the cities. Also not sure what counts as looking bad to you, a lot of these villages or small cities are actually quite nice looking (we often go to such places for a day trip) & if I was single/childless and wanted to live a quiet life without much disturbance I'd definitely check them out. They are mostly just not in easy commuting distance to jobs. In fact some of the places in Berlin with the highest rents (like Kreuzberg) are often a lot uglier than sleepy Brandenburg villages & small towns.
• ArkVark 6y ago
  This is the problem with a lack of land and property taxation. Elderly people will hold onto assets forever, until death essentially, whilst the building and society collapses around them. Meanwhile they demand a huge amount of welfare and healthcare services without paying into the system. At least the land tax system in the USA encourages downsizing and efficient allocation of this resource.
  • jacobush 6y ago
    Where the land tax works. Which is not most places in the USA.
  • theandrewbailey 6y ago
    Most of the USA doesn't have a land tax. Instead, there is a property tax, which is determined by what's sitting on the land.
    • kube-system 6y ago
      This not true. US property taxes nearly all tax both the land and any improvements (i.e. permanent structures) that sit on it. My property in the US is taxed by: ( [assessed value of the land] + [assessed value of the building(s)] ) * [tax rate] = [total tax] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_States#Property_subject_to_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...
  • rbecker 6y ago
    Land tax also does not allow you to simply exist - you have to make a profit to pay the tax. You can't just grow your own food and ignore the economy. It also comes with perverse incentives, like opposing anything that might raise property values unless you want to sell. Perhaps it's a uniquely American view, having no connection to the land you live on, looking at it as just an economic resource to be 'allocated'.
    • dragandj 6y ago
      Even in pre-civilised societies you couldn't simply exist. You didn't pay taxes, yet you also had to work hard to protect the land from intruders, or, heck, even had to bust your ass off to provide regular access to basic things such as water and food.
• mooreds 6y ago
  Can you buy someplace in Spain where the market isn't awful and hold there? Or maybe the answer is to be a house renter your entire life and just save in other ways?
  • Arkhaine_kupo 6y ago
    Spain has a big issue which OP didn't mention. We built more houses than were needed between 2000-2008. Which sadly means a ton of the emoty homes are owned by Banks, so if they devalue the houses their stock price plummets. So they are incentivized to keep the prices artificially high.
    • iagovar 6y ago
      That isn't the case anymore. Most of the stock has already been sold, and what isn't sold has been transferred to Sareb, except a few ones that may produce some profit in the future.
• TomGullen 6y ago
  > Yeah they know that their property is falling apart but they won't buy under $value because they bought it at that price or similar reasonings. That sounds like part of a chain of dominos to me. I'd imagine given time this would be less common.
  • iagovar 6y ago
    Given enough time some properties would be basically worth less than 0€
  • HPsquared 6y ago
    People with big mortgages can't easily sell, as they need to raise enough funds to pay it off.
• dmurray 6y ago
  Move to Italy and buy one of the €1 houses in the article? The language is easy for you, and depending where you are in Spain, it might be a closer move than to other parts of Spain. Of course there's a catch, but if what you really want is to own your own home and you're flexible about where you live, you're the right person for this kind of initiative.
  • iagovar 6y ago
    If I emigrate I would do for the money, It doesn't make sense from my POV to go to a tiny town in a country I don't know, leaving behind my friends an relatives. The same applies for everywhere else.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    I think you're dismissing the tax implications too easily. Unless they are waiving the taxes you're still going to pay a at least 10k€ just for the title change alone.
  • jandrese 6y ago
    There's usually a catch to these effectively free real estate deals. Like the home is a registered historic site so you're on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands in maintenance that all has to be approved by some council of greybeards who won't accept anything that isn't made in exactly the same way it was 500 years ago. "These replacement stones were worked with power tools, they've lost their authenticity!" By the way the land is on a consecrated ancient battlefield/holy site, so you can't put a shovel in it without a full archeological review.
    • MrFoof 6y ago
      The most common catches I'm aware of (doing some research) are: * Some towns have a requirement that you start a small business to qualify. * In some towns the houses are auctioned with a starting bid of one Euro. The nicest ones will get bid up a fair bit, but a lot of them close for one to five thousand euro. The nicest ones (minimal renovation required) can close for up to twenty-five thousand euros. * Often a refundable deposit of two to five thousand euros is required, with the catch that you start moving in or renovating within a year and complete moving in and/or renovating within three years. * The houses are often long abandoned. Renovation costs are going to be what they are -- significant -- so you best be handy, as you can cut your renovation costs by 80-90% if you eliminate labor costs. Regardless, your renovations will need to be approved. * Tax contracts and real estate closing costs, which will typically be a few (as in, around 2 to 3) thousand euros.
• bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Or you could just wait. A lot of people have been surprised that the housing market hasn't crashed. Two of the theories are: 1: supply is more elastic than demand. In other words, more sellers took potential listings off the market than buyers stopped looking. 2: governments printing money inflated investor assets like stocks and real estate. If these are true, a backlog of listings from could flood the market next year, and the government money printing machine should turn off too. So perhaps the real estate adjustment has just been delayed. But who knows, predicting what the market is going to in these crazy time is a mug's game.
  • onion2k 6y ago
    Over the past 30 years buy-to-let has fundamentally changed the housing market to the point where I honestly don't believe there'll ever be a housing market crash again. Rich people will buy up all the available housing stock to rent out (or to AirBnB) if there's a small price drop. That will stop there ever being a big price drop. Barring a sea change in housing policy that enables massive amounts of new houses to be built, I would make a significant wager that in 50 years time about 75% of people will rent their home all their life.
    • david927 6y ago
      My feeling is that the pandemic and impending economic collapse will change that. Remember when the 2008 crisis hit, no one was buying but no one was renting either. And a lot of banks with real estate on their books just let it sit there (where it sits today). Once a the credit default domino chain starts to fall, people and organization will need to get liquid. The first stage will see some people jump in on pent-up demand but after that, real estate will fall through the floor. It will literally drop to near nothing in places.
      • benrbray 6y ago
        > no one was buying but no one was renting either. As someone who was in eighth grade at the time, can you clarify what you mean by this? Every person either 1) buys property, 2) rents property, 3) goes homeless, or 4) dies. There aren't really any other choices.
• H8crilA 6y ago
  Sometimes I wish that people could short sell homes ...
  • wizzwizz4 6y ago
    They're not fungible, so that wouldn't even make sense. What do you mean?
  • pjlegato 6y ago
    There are shortable futures contracts tied to US housing price indexes[1], but they're highly illiquid (rarely trade, and have wide bid/ask spreads). This is probably related to the difficulty of hedging, since as another poster points out housing is not fungible, and to the very high transaction costs involved in buying or selling the underlying. [1] https://www.homepricefutures.com/ https://www.homepricefutures.com/
    • H8crilA 6y ago
      Yeah I know about those. Robert Shiller was behind this project, in his mind many mortgages should be bundled with a put option on such an index. I agree. Needles to say his idea didn't catch on. Here I was thinking about shorting specific homes, those for which one of the parent comments implied that their value is substantially lower than the current asking prices. It's a very futuristic idea, though not entirely impossible. If you're long on something then lending that thing out to a short seller is profitable because he has to pay you the lending fees (usually up to a few % per year).
      • pjlegato 6y ago
        Interesting idea! Who would take the other (long) side of the trade? Why would someone who thinks housing prices are going up not just buy a house outright?
        • HPsquared 6y ago
          Perhaps to take advantage of overly-pessimistic short sellers? :P Not that I'm taking a position either way, I actually suspect (real) prices will probably fall if interest rates ever normalise.
• novok 6y ago
  So property taxes aren't high enough to encourage them to rent or sell out the properties?
  • closeparen 6y ago
    Usually the owner hasn't been paying taxes, and the back taxes become your responsibility when you buy the house.
• ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
  This is super interesting, because the land registry in Barcelona reflects something like 25% of market value today for cadastral value, and was even less before their recent adjustment (+50% in my case) a couple years ago.
  • biolurker1 6y ago
    Explain more?
• jcmontx 6y ago
  How's the credit/mortgage situation in Spain? Isn't it feasible to buy a small property taking a loan at a reasonable rate?