Crash course

25 March 2010 By Fiona Maharg-Bravo

House sales perked up in January, but it’s far too early to call the end of the slump. Unwanted new homes are still hitting the market, while more than 1 million stand empty. Even if the unemployment rate starts to fall soon, the market may not fully clear until 2013.

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House sales in Spain were 2.1 percent higher in January 2010 than in January 2009, according to the National Statistics Institute. December sales were 0.3 percent lower than a year earlier. In April 2009, the decline from the previous year was 47.6 percent, a record.

There were 462,747 homes sold in Spain in 2009, 18 percent less than the previous year. In the last quarter, transactions rose by 4.1 percent against the same period a year earlier, according to data from the Ministry of Housing.

Meanwhile, the average value of a mortgage fell 9.1 percent to 120,148 euros in December 2009 compared to the same month in 2008, and 4 percent below November, according to data release on Feb. 25 by the INE. Gross mortgage origination showed a 2.9 percent fall to 47,700 units.

House prices fell 6.1 percent in the last quarter of the year, according to the Ministry of Housing data, and is down 10.6 percent from the peak registered in the second quarter of 2008. The INE, which publishes a separate index, said prices fell 4.3 percent in the last quarter of the year compared to a year earlier after a 7 percent slide in the July to September period.

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