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Edition 301
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HOME TRUTHS
he number of homes on the Costa Blanca sold to British buyers has fallen since last June's Brexit vote and the fall in the value of the pound, according to figures supplied by notaries in the Valencia region. House sales to UK nationals between July and September in Alicante Province have seen a 17 percent drop compared to a year earlier, on the back of steady rises over the previous five years, and is the first annual fall in sales over a three-month quarter since 2011. British buyers are the largest foreign group of property purchasers on the Costa Blanca at 26 percent, with a similar figure for the Murcia region, but the notaries say that the slowdown was apparent before
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Friday 9th December 2016
June’s Brexit referendum, with the rise in UK purchases in the second quarter of 2016 slipping to just under 10 percent. Experts put that drop down to pre-referendum jitters, as the first quarter of the year, saw a 30 percent annual rise in British buyers. A total of 1,041 properties were sold to UK purchasers in Alicante Province between July and September, with the notaries saying that options to buy properties were not taken up by buyers in the light of the referendum result. Mark Stucklin of the Second-Home and Resort Industry Observatory said: “We have carried out a survey of the sector and it appears that house purchases by Brits on the Costa del Sol and the Costa
BY ALEX TRELINSKI Blanca have fallen by around 50 percent since the referendum.” Stucklin said that the British-buying market had always closely mirrored the fluctuation in the pound-toeuro exchange rate, with the pound currently down
around 18 percent compared with the end of 2015. “While demand from other countries such as Germany, Belgium, Sweden and France is growing, in the short term it’s not enough to make up for the lost British buyers,” added Stucklin.
A RAINY SUNDAY
he biggest rains of the year came in the first weekend of December, with Sunday seeing up to 140 litres of rain per square metre dumping down in some northern areas of Alicante Province. Rainfall levels were comparatively minor in the Mar Menor, but further south, the Costa Del Sol saw severe flashflooding which cost two lives. The southern part of Alicante Province saw average levels of 70 litres of rain per square metre, with umbrellas the order of the day in areas like Torrevieja’s Paseo Juan Aparicio (picture from the Mastral Project). There were few
reports of flooding, apart from the usual roads that suffer during intense cloud bursts. Orihuela City’s new high speed AVE railway station was affected, including the lifts failing to work, but the main drama was on the Costa del Sol, which saw some of the biggest flash floods in a quarter of a century. Two people drowned in incidents on Sunday, with an electrician, who was in his work van with three colleagues, when a flash flood hit at La Linea close to the border with Gibraltar. Up the coast, a 26-yearold woman lost her life after becoming trapped by flood
waters in a Estepona as
brothel in emergency
services in helicopters failed to save her.
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