How much is my property worth in Tenerife? – A question that arises quite often in my world.
If you’ve sold a property in the UK over recent years, you’ll have heard of Zoopla. On this site and maybe some others do it now as well, there’s data about how much the houses in your particular road sold for over the last few years – I’ve just looked at their website and seen that some records go back even 20 years.
So, the question is, how much is my property worth in Tenerife and how do you work it out?
Where can you get up-to-date pricing for a property that’s for sale in Tenerife?
There’s nothing like Zoopla in Tenerife – if only. You see, the thing is that over the years there’s been too much black money or under the table payments when buyers and sellers have been at the notary it skews the figures they produce.
If you agree to buy a property from the seller for €150.000 but the seller wants to declare that they’re selling it for €125.000 on the title deeds that get signed at the notary, the buyer must stump up the extra in black money – cash.
This leads to notary offices reporting the value of properties to the Land Registry office as they see them…and in the example I made above, the property was sold for €150.000 but reported as €125.000 – you see the problem? Even if we here in Tenerife or Spain had something along the lines of the data that Zoopla provides for the UK market, there would still be a marked difference between the true and reported sales values.
Now, as an estate agent I don’t like the black money thing at all because it leads to a number of potential future problems for the buyers and possibly sellers, here’s not the place to discuss that but the problem of black money still goes on and until we get this out of the way there’s no way to get around it, but even if it was stopped tomorrow, it would still take years to build up a good database of sold property values in Spain.
So, can we actually get a good idea of property prices and if so, from where?
There are a number of ways that you can get an idea of prices but do we look at asking prices or do we look at supposed sales prices?
As you’ve already seen, prices that are recorded at notary offices and Land Registry offices can’t be relied upon 100% but it’s a good place to start.
You could always look at the General Council of Notaries – (http://www.notariado.org/liferay/es/web/notariado/inicio) – to start with. They offer a website in Spanish and English and you can come up with some metre squared figures for municipalities. so maybe a good place to start but of course, taking the figures with a pinch of salt.
There’s always the National Institute of Statistics or in Spanish, Instituto nacional de estadisticas – (http://www.ine.es/en/welcome.shtml) – this website is a government run site giving statistics for all things Spanish, including their take on property prices in Spain and the Canary Islands. I imagine that they get their prices directly form the Land Registry offices, who in turn have been told their values by the notary offices – OK, and we already know what goes on there.
You could try the website for the Bank of Spain (http://www.bde.es) – again, figures from the Land Registry offices I guess, so probably similar to the other two sources above.
Tinsa is an independent property valuation company – (https://www.tinsa.es) – and they get asked to go out and value property by banks for mortgages so surely these guys will have a better idea. Well, the thing with this is, since the credit crunch and the big crash of 2009, banks and valuers have been a little on the careful side in recent years, valuing property at very safe numbers just in case it happens again, so although they’ll provide us with figures, they’ll be a lot less than the actual selling prices of the properties.
One thing we could think about would be asking prices. We all know that you’re unlikely to pay this price but it would give an idea of the prices people are asking for their properties in Tenerife and then we could gauge it by maybe making an assessment that the actual selling price could be the asking price less say 5 or 10%…maybe that’ll work.
The problem with that system is that some people may have a mortgage that needs paying off on their property and their asking price is based on the fact that the mortgage has to be paid off and then on the other hand there may be some people that are really motivated to sell and their price is a lot keener, so there’ll be a bit of a difference.
In fact, based upon asking prices Idealista, (https://www.idealista.com/en) – one of the property portals for Spain including Tenerife have, over recent times has developed a system where their website users can make an offer on a property and they’ve been collating the asking prices and the offer prices. They now have some quite usable data of the properties that have been advertised on their portal, in fact I think that Kyero – (https://www.kyero.com/) – another property portal has been doing the same and they’ve also got some data too.
So, is there an answer to – How much is my Tenerife property worth?
Of course, the easy answer is – “As much as someone is willing to pay for it” but that’s a very short and unhelpful answer.
You need to take a lot of things into account and as I said earlier, it’s not really that easy.
Of course, there are other things that need to be taken into account. It’s all very well for the valuers and the notary offices to tell us the cost per square metre in Tenerife, but that doesn’t narrow it down as much as the data on Zoopla in the UK does. They’ve got some really awesome data, showing the postcode and at times being able to boil it down to road number too.
Here in Tenerife, there are loads of things we still need to think about apart from the obvious number of bedrooms…
What condition is it in?
What complex is it?
Sea or pool view or maybe no view at all?
Town or countryside?
All of those things will have an impact on the value of the property, so how do we go about assessing the value of the property we have to market?
Of course we have the data of the properties that we have sold personally in the area, also we get to know the areas that we sell properties in, so we get an idea from that. We can also use general asking prices for properties in the area that other agents have for sale.
It’s not a certain clear-cut way of doing it for us agents in Tenerife, there’s always room for error, whereas the local estate agent in the UK will be able to use Zoopla and find information on the last 3 properties that sold in that street but if we can get away from the black money thing – all the better and then, maybe in the future, we’ll be able to reliably use the figures that the notary offices register and maybe we’ll be able to have our own Zoopla type figures.
Roll on the day…
