Spanish home sales stats

We don't know if we're being passé or merely retro, but here's our now less-than-regular glimpse at Spanish home sale statistics. Most notable, of course, is the continuing effect of spikes in activity last year - both related to changes in the tax treatment of purchases. In one year, we have consequently seen two multi-year highs - and two series lows. Mariano Rajoy, for his part, is now adding to the confusion by promising that the PP, if elected November 20, will reinstate the income tax deduction for a principal residence - with retroactive effect. Knowing politicians and their promises, exactly who is going to sink their money into a new home until he makes good on his word? Or fails to.

Meanwhile, trailing 12-month sales continue their downward drift. Currently at 422 thousand, we can imagine them hitting 400 before Rajoy clears the air on this matter and banks solve their reported liquidity problems.

Long time readers will remember when we railed and ranted about the inadequacy of using the unadorned American-style house price-to-income ratio to measure the affordability of Spanish homes (newer victims might poke around the 'real estate economy' category for the autumn-winter of 2009-2010). With regard to our incessantly repeated point that home ownership costs not related to purchase price or financing were so much higher in the U.S. than in Spain that they rendered any analysis based on price alone utterly inane.

Those familiar with Spanish carrying costs (and still interested in the matter) should take a look at this NPR article on what American banks are financially up against with their stocks of foreclosed residences. Or they could go and look at Credit Sesame's interactive map showing average property taxes in all 50 U.S. states. Placing the mouse pointer over any state produces statistics to the right of the map.

Louisiana is the state in which annual taxes as a percent of house value, for example, most approximate the same in Spain.

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