The Ultimate Homes Blog

Hope you all have had a wonderful Christmas with family and friends and received all the gifts desired. Now on to the New Year celebrations!!!

The Tinsa property price index for November shows that average prices fell by 6.6% over the last 12 months, down from 7.4% last month. That’s the smallest fall in a year. As you can see from the chart above, price falls stabilised at around 10% in the first half of the year, and started shrinking from July onwards. On present trends prices will be rising again within a few months. Property prices are already reported to be rising strongly in the UK. The price of the average house is up by £13,000 to almost £168,000 since the trough earlier in the year, according to Halifax. Moving back to Spain, even the price of property on the coast is falling at a slower rate, narrowing to -8.9% in November, just above what it was a year ago (-8.5%). Coastal property prices have been hit the hardest thanks to the surplus of holiday homes for which there is little market in a recession. There was a dramatic improvement in the index for The Balearics and The Canaries, where prices were down just 3.2% ...

Up to 90,000 foreigners who have sold a holiday home in Spain in the past 12 years could be owed thousands of pounds by the Spanish tax authority. During that time, the price of holiday homes in Spain enjoyed a huge boom, with prices peaking in 2007. But while the locals paid just 15% in capital gains tax (CGT) on their profits when they sold, Britons and other non-residents were charged a hefty 35%. Experts estimate the homeowners who sold since 1997 could be due an average £13,500 tax refund. The European Court of Justice has opened the door to this huge tax rebate for non-residents by ruling that the tax regime was 'unlawful and discriminatory' to other EU citizens. This latest ruling paves the way for tax rebates totalling £283m, according to calculations by foreign currency specialists HiFX. The ruling applies to homes sold after 1986, when Spain joined the European Community, but the differences in the level of CGT charged to Spanish and UK nationals mean that rebates are...