subject: House Prices In The Costa Del Crash [print this page] The crisis in the Costa Blanca in Spain, recently known as the Costa del Crash is resulting in foreigners leaving the region in flocks since 2009. The house prices in the capital, Alicante, fell an average of 13% in September 2010 over the same month last year, according to ,Gartoo.es, a property search engine in Spain.
The coastline of Alicante began to be known as the Costa Blanca by the many British tourists spending their holidays in the region as early as in the 1950s. A few decades later it became one of the most popular destinations for a legion of British and European pensioners. Now the term Costa del Crash is being coined for one the martyr province of immigrants in Spain.
Small towns like Els Poblets, where German and Scandinavian pensioners are majority over the total national population, are registering house prices -32% lower for 3 bedroom houses, the archetypical new build in the area, from their peak in 2008, Gartoo reports.
The crisis has beaten particularly hard those sectors that used to generate more employment; building and services. Immigration of workers and pensioners became a phenomenon of great demographic and economic importance in the Costa Blanca since the 1990s. Tourists kept booking their holidays in the many hotels in the region and pensioners started buying cheap apartments and villas. By 1997, building planning permissions went past the threshold of economic sustainability and the demand of workforce in the region attracted thousands of foreigners.
For every 100 newly censored inhabitants in the region over the past decade, eighty people were foreigners. These are classified as workers paying taxes to the Spanish Inland Revenue and pensioners mostly from Germany, Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. Official statistics of tax payers tend to be more accurate than of pensioners who do not pay taxes on their income. From 2009 to date, Alicante had less tax payers of foreign origin by the first time in many years, according to data provided by the Ministry of Employment. This is a significant change of trend since 26% of the province population are immigrants. According to the 2009 census, the town with the highest proportion of foreigners in the Costa Blanca was San Fulgencio.
Unfinished buildings are part now of the landscape not only in the cost but also deeper inland. The pressure of the development of thousands of homes and dozens of golf courses and hotels is receding, but the legacy of decades of insane economic development will stay for many years to come.
