A place in Spain

At the beginning of this year, the company I work for took over a smaller competitor. Some months later (surprise, surprise) cost cutting measures were announced, which included an offer allowing early retirement. After some thought Ruth and I decided it was an offer too good to pass up, and I signed up. So I finish work in the middle of next year.

We have been thinking for some time, that when we retire, we’d like to move to Spain – we have spent the last 4-5 years doing Spanish courses and looking around the different regions of Spain to decide where we might retire. We settled last year on the region around Valencia. Valencia is a nice size – not too big, but plenty going on. There are also a number of nice towns nearby. So having signed on the dotted line at work, we went down to Spain to start doing some serious research – what property can you really get for your money?

We have been observing the market for well over a year, using web sites like kyero, trovit and fotocasa.

Despite 18% unemployment in Spain, and reports of massive falls in prices, we didn’t actually see that happening much around Valencia. Although property is moving very slowly, many people are not reducing the asking price much. They seem to be hanging on and hoping that the market will recover. Our impression is that it is mainly speculative developers who have suffered; private sellers are hanging on if they don’t absolutely have to move now.

We don’t want to live in a development on the coast, however, and don’t want to live in area with a high proportion of British or Germans. We feel if we do that, we’ll be too lazy to carry on learning Spanish, and will miss out on a lot of the cultural aspects of living in Spain. During our past explorations we found Xàtiva, a town with a population about 30 000 about 45 minutes south of Valencia and about the same driving time from the coast.

We have just got back from 3 weeks holiday house hunting around Xàtiva and inland from Gandia, which like Xàtiva is about 60 km south of Valencia, but on the coast. We’ve looked at everything: building plots, houses which needed renovating, ones we could move into straight away and very shoddily built “Bauruinen“. There doesn’t seem to be a word in English for describing a Bauruine, which is a definite deficit of the English language. There seem to be plenty in Spain at the moment. One agency in Gandia seemed determined to show us all of the ones in the Valencia area. We were told later that some Spanish estate agencies like to show you houses that are absolutely unsuitable at the beginning to soften you up; later they show you property which fits the bill in the hope you will be so pleased to finally find something suitable, that you will immediately buy it. It that is true, it didn’t work with us, as we broke off using the agency before they finished showing us their Bauruinen.

To cut a long story short, we returned last weekend having found a plot of 2200 sq.m. just outside Xàtiva. Now, we are waiting to see if the vendor is really prepared to sell it – when we got back, we heard that one of the two business partners selling it has decided he wants 30% more than the price it was on the market for. We will see. We’ll post more information about the land if it looks like the sale is going ahead, otherwise we have several alternatives to choose from.