prices are falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability

prices are falling, buyers are disappearing and developers, starved of loans by Spanish banks nervous about international financial instability, are going bust.
the Costas, developments lie half-finished, without water and electricity, and without any prospect of being sold.For Spain's notoriously corrupt and capricious planning regime, which gave birth to the developments now disfiguring virtually all the country's Mediterranean coastline, the chickens are coming home to roost.
Houses built on the nod of corrupt mayors are being refused retrospective planning permission by regional administrations under pressure from the green lobby. Many properties, new and not-so-new, are blighted by illegality and are the effectively worthless; others have simply been demolished.Scan the websites used by current or potential British expatriates and you will find people desperate for advice about how to reclaim deposits that they will, in many cases, never see again - and all at the wrong end of life, when lost savings cannot be recouped.Even the biggest Spanish firms are going under. Last month, Martinsa-Fadesa, a major and respected player, filed for bankruptcy.Gwilym Rhys-Jones is a financial investigator based on the Costa del Sol, and a longtime observer of the Spanish property scene. He says that even large, well-known builders were accepting deposits for off-plan developments that had no planning permission."These things are no more than pipe dreams, but there was such a ready supply of British and north European buyers that all they had to do was show them a pretty drawing and they were falling over themselves to buy them."Drive along the coast south of Alicante and the results of the Spanish property bubble are there to see: serried ranks of exquisitely tasteless, often empty, villas advancing in close order up isolated, parched hillsides.Many have been built in locations totally unsuitable for housing: by the sides of dual carriageways, away from shops and amenities - anywhere that developers could find a landowner willing to sell.Property has driven the Spanish economy like no other in the European Union. Last year, housing investment accounted for a tenth of GDP and 13 per cent of private sector jobs.

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