Mortgages In Spain

Looking at the way thinks are shaping up in Spain, and at the same time living here, I am obviously going to follow this one close up now.

I have been looking in the statistics office site for data on mortgages, but unfortunately the most recent we have at this point are July. Since the data we really need are for September, this means we won't really know the full extent of the initial hit on Spain till early December. Nonetheless some indication can be obtained by looking at what was happening before things seized up.


If we look first and the number of mortgages made each month.




Now if we look at the value of these mortgages in millions of euro.





What we can see is that the property market in Spain really peaked towards the end of 2006. The market hit a bottom in April, but there was a rebound in May (offers from property promotors?). But the rebound was not sustained and then the market again resumed the downward march. All we need to know now is the extent of the damage in September, and how low can we go. I am not optimistic. This is with us for some timne to come, and will probably be - proportionately - much more important that what is happening now in the United States.