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Competition fails to taint Brits' Spanish dream

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Although Britons are looking further a field than the traditional ex-pat haunts of the Mediterranean costas and the French countryside than ten years ago, they still have a hard resolve to invest in Spain, claims a leading property expert.

This week a study by Conti Financial Services said that an increasing number of Britons are selling their Spanish homes and returning to the UK, prompting fears that the British obsession with the dream holiday home in Spain was beginning to dwindle.

However, these fears appear unfounded as the Spanish property market is currently in state of transition, meaning that buyers are changing habits rather than following a mass exodus from one of Europe's most dynamic property markets.

As has been widely reported, Spain, like the UK, is now emerging as one of Europe's more mature housing markets and so while it can offer holiday home buyers stable long-term incomes, investors will not see the dramatic price rises of ten years ago.

Thus, the Spanish property market has seen the number of traditional buyers subside in recent years as accommodation in emerging markets such as Bulgaria, Slovakia and Poland have usurped Spain's position as the property hotspot of Europe.

However, these locations have also suffered from volatile markets which have seen price rapidly falls as well as increase.

But new observational research reports that buyers looking to make a quick buck may be opting for north Africa.

Ailse MacFarlane, marketing director of Spanish Living, said the property firm had noticed "an awful lot of British buyers interested in very cheap property" in Morocco, where one can reportedly pick up apartments for as little as €15,000 to €20,000. This appears to mirror the Spanish phenomenon of cheap property in the mid-nineties.

Ms MacFarlane admitted that "there will definitely be some competition" for the Spanish market with Morocco building six new resorts by 2010 but also noted "although it's only a half-an-hour boat ride from the south of Spain, it is a completely different culture".

She continued to explain that while there is no longer the mass migration to the Spanish costas there is "still a huge amount of interest in buying in Spain".

Due to the fact that "a lot of them [Brits] have less money to spend", Ms MacFarlane added that many are enquiring about "the north of Spain where the climate is a lot more like Britain and where there isn't as much skyrocketing of prices and people get better value for money".

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