By The housing bubble has exploded. But their worst effects may be to come in the new building. To unpaid mortgages and delinquencies, and the ensuing foreclosures, a phenomenon may happen up to now unpublished in the Spanish real estate market. It is called negative equity in the Anglo market and consists that there comes a time in which the amount of the mortgage is greater than the current value of the floor in the market if the owner tries to sell it to lower housing prices. And according to a report by the agency Standard & Poor s, 8% of the mortgage in Spain is located in such a situation of economic losses.
The problem may worsen since the agency warns that if the price of housing in Spain continue to fall up to 30% from the highs recorded in 2007, compared with the decrease of 20% estimated so far by some indices, the percentage of mortgages with economic losses would amount to 19.6%. The study by S & P structured finance area has been made with the analysis of the securitization rated by the Agency, encompassing more than 800,000 mortgage loans in Spain. The problem can become a nightmare for thousands of mortgage because the forecasts are not optimistic. The same agency noted in its study that housing prices continue to fall, even when other real estate markets have stopped falling. And not only S & P. The European Commission has also indicated in its latest report that the price of housing in Spain is still too high, and estimated that Spanish floors are still overvalued 17%, well above 3% on average in the eurozone.
This situation of patrimonial loss affects more autonomous communities which has seen the greatest declines in prices, as well as between the most recent mortgage loans (2007 and 2008). Thus, the highest rate of economic losses is observed in Valencia (12.4%), Navarre (12.3%), Castilla – La Mancha (11.4%) and Murcia (10.6%), while that Galicia (1.4%), Extremadura (2.9%), Castilla y Leon (3.4%), Asturias and Cantabria (3.9%) show lower incidence of negative equity. For its part, Aragon has a percentage of 9.4%, while Madrid, Andalusia and La Rioja recorded a rate of 8.3%; Catalonia stood at 7.3%; and Basque country reaches 5.2%.