Last week sent waves of panic through the worldwide property market as a large scale panic selling of Spanish real estate stocks prompted fears of a property crash based on the belief that the boom in Spanish property was over. Only time will tell as to whether the investors were wise to dump their stocks in Spanish property, however, are there also concerns for our other favourite investment hotspots?

Latvia

Latvia has been a star performer in terms of property over the past couple of years. Last year saw house prices increasing in the capital Riga by an astonishing 66% overall. Since joining the EU in 2004, the country has become a magnet for canny investors from major European nations wishing to get in on the property market at rock bottom. This fuelled a rush in external investment in the country. There is a worry that the market is currently overvalued and foreign investors will want to sell out quickly at a premium so that a new hotspot can be uncovered. This is an issue that the Latvian government seems very aware of and it has been announced that they will be introducing new legislation that will tax the profits of the sale of real estate within the first three years of ownership – this is an extension of the current rule which allows taxation within the first year.

UK

Confounding experts the UK property market continues to be a strong investment candidate even though experts are predicting the Bank of England will increase interest rates twice during this year. Nevertheless, the property market is still buoyed by the buy to let market and it is not expected that there will be a property crash, rather there will be a slight slow down as a consequence of the expected interest rises.

Spain

After five years of double digit growth in the property market, 2006 saw a more modest return of 9% and gains are expected to be lower this year. This can be partly attributed to increased competition from cheaper property investment destinations and the recent admission of several European nations into the EU, which caused a flood of investment. An old favourite of the British investor, Spain still has an enviable property investment market, but the time of large gains may well be over.

The buy to let property market in the UK is currently being fuelled by a number of increasingly affluent landlords in the belief that bricks and mortar will provide the best form of investment available. Recent research suggests that 1 million more individuals are set to purchase a buy to let property in the next four years and by the year 2011 the number of buy to let investors will have doubled.

Factors determining investment in buy to let property include worries about inadequate pensions, higher divorce and immigration rates and an ever increasing student population leading to a demand for rental properties.

Currently 1 in 10 mortgages granted in the UK is for buy to let investors with 58% having two or fewer properties. Obviously it will not have gone unnoticed amongst these investors that average rents have increased by 53% in England in the last decade.

Economists are predicting further interest rates being made by the Bank of England this year but at this time this is not slowing the appetite for the voracious UK buy to let investor.

Property in the most salubrious areas of London are currently growing in price faster than any other time in the last 28 years according to estate agent Knight Frank. The estate agent claims that £1 million plus houses in the smart areas of London such as Mayfair, Chelsea and Belgravia increased in price by 2.6 % alone in the month of February and during 2006 the increase was a staggering 31% overall.

It is believed that the surge in prices is being fuelled by huge City bonuses and an influx of millionaire buyers from overseas countries such as Russia and Italy.

Knight Frank believe that the price increases in central London will continue well into 2007 and forecast an overall increase of 12% for the year. This forecast is believed to be on the conservative side due to increases so far this year of 5.6%.

Now that you have found your dream house and you have finalised the completion of your own house sale, you will need to go through the tedious formalities of updating your address details that are held at various suppliers. We have collated a list containing a number of common entities that you will need to inform of a change of address.

It maybe helpful for you to print out our Change of Address Checklist document so that you can strike off each provider you have contacted for peace of mind. If there are any additional companies or services that you would like to see added to the list please leave a comment and we will do our best to update the list.

If there ever was a marriage made in heaven it would be the implementation of Web 2.0 principles into real estate websites… so where are they?

I’m waiting to see an AJAX site with individual real estate properties that can be tagged by area or specification and drag and dropped into a personal account review area. I want to see 360 degree virtual tours – if we can implement this on travel websites, why not on real estate sites where the sales (and margins) are far higher. Publishing newly marketed properties via RSS feeds seems like a no-brainer, but I don’t currently see this happening in the industry.

Typically when individuals want to purchase a new property, they will narrow down the search to a specific location and search within those defined parameters. This sounds like a cue for a real estate comparison engine don’t you think? It seems that we have comparison engines for virtually every aspect of consumer life at the moment, but not for potentially the largest purchase we will ever make in our lives, a new home. Why is this?

There are a small number of sites that are working towards a Web 2.0 ideals (although non outside the US that I am aware of), sites that come to mind are:

Zillow

Trulia

PropertyShark 

The real estate industry is huge worldwide ($11 billion spent in 2006 on marketing in the US alone), so I am baffled by the lack of online technical sophistication shown at the moment. If any developers have nice Ruby widgets they want to show off to the community, please enlighten us all.