A survey by Barclays Bank four years ago suggested a million Britons intended to leave the UK for Spain, but in the past two years the UK market has dropped so significantly that some developers have stopped promoting Spain to Britons.Jesús Pérez set up Seville-based Area 10 New World to sell Spanish properties to UK buyers. In 2006, he switched to selling homes in Romania, Hungary, Germany and Portugal. 'A few years ago I was selling six houses in a single day to Brits,' he said. 'Things changed so quickly that we no longer promote Spanish properties .'The national government started to implement a campaign to clear any developments deemed to be too close to the beach, under the 1988 Ley de Costas, or Coastal Law. Though it insists it is not planning widespread demolitions, the government has not placated homeowners who say the drive is unfair as the law is being applied retroactively to properties built legally in the 1970s.A lobby group set up to fight the campaign says that the government's drive could affect tens of thousands of families, around 10 per cent of whom are British expats.Clifford Carter, 59, and his wife María José Ruiz Giner, 58, have been told they no longer own the ground on which their home in El Saler, Valencia, is built because the house breaches the Ley de Costas. Carter, a retired electronics engineer from south London, said: 'We have owned the chalet since 1976 and it was built legally 17 years before the Ley de Costas came into effect. We received a letter from the government saying we are no longer the legal owners of the land. We've been told we can live here until we die, but we cannot sell the house or pass it on to our children. It is scandalous.'
Half of the country's estate agents have closed, last year 50,000 construction workers lost their jobs and 20,000 fewer new homes are expected to be sold this year.
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