So there is now a Kayak Espana…

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really. They already have the UK, German, and French sites out of beta.

Some thoughts:

1. This will be good news for the folks at Trabber. The entry of a big American player will likely attract more media attention to the product of a travel aggregator, and some of this attention should spill over to Trabber, as they are the ‘local version’.
2. I’m very pleased, because Kayak is the only search engine I know that has a great service for multi-leg flights.
3. Finally, I find it interesting that after the UK, France, and Germany, the next country site to be rolled out is Spain and not Italy or Netherlands or Sweden. It seems to me that Spain is really becoming a tier-1 market, one that simply can’t be ignored by any company with a “Europe strategy”. Growing from 40 to 45 million in population in a decade, in a continent with shrinking populations certainly helps.

Over on the properazzi BMP blog we’ve posted the slides from Leslie Crawford’s presentation that has so shaken up the conference audience.

If you missed it, the talk was a very sober, even grim forecast of the property market in Spain in the next few years. Very controversial stuff…

Click here to see the presentation slides.

Some notes from the conference, where properazzi are blogging all the major talks:

• Senior Financial Times correspondent Leslie Crawford gave a very bearish talk on real estate in Spain, claiming that Spain is just two years behind the crisis that is happening in the US today. This did not make her very popular with the audience, I understand she left the building in a bullet-proof vest (just kidding).
• Spain’s Minister of Housing, Carme Chacon, turned up for the world’s fastest ribbon-cutting, followed by a sprint across the exhibition hall to visit some stands, and get mobbed by journalists and photographers. Maybe they were all wanting to ask her what she thought of Leslie Crawford’s contrarian speech.

more updates later!

It’s one of the largest real estate conferences in Europe: this year’s Barcelona Meeting Point is starting tomorrow, and we have partnered up with the organizers to blog the entire event.

We’re really pleased about this because BMP and Properazzi share a lot in common: a global, international outlook, expertise in handling large volumes (them exhibitors, us property listings), and we are both based in Barcelona!

You can follow the action at BMP at the Properazzi BMP2007 blog.

A widely discussed article on how the ever-advanced Japanese are starting to abandon PCs made me curious today to check our own stats…and surprise, surprise: people are starting to access properazzi using devices that are most definitely *not* PCs. Property searching on an iphone I can understand, but on a playstation3?

No Wii or Xbox yet, though…

Wolfgang Munchau thinks Eurozone interest rates should be raised to avert inflation. He’s probably right, but it will mean *a lot* of pain in Spain.

Inflation in Spain is already too high, but the dependence on construction and housing is also too high. Wherever rates go, either people will lose purchasing power on a major scale (they already are), or the most important sector in the economy will suffer a sharp correction.

The weird thing is that Spaniards will just have to watch this unfold because the decision regarding rates isn’t theirs, but the ECB’s.

Link: Raise eurozone rates now or risk inflation

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I don’t have to read the newspapers to see that property in Barcelona is overvalued.

Exhibit A: the apartment below mine is on the rental market. It’s newly restored, is 200 m2 in size (that’s about 2000 sq feet, for the Anglo-Saxons out there ), and is going for 2000 euros/month.

Exhibit B: the apartment exactly opposite mine on the other side of the street is for sale. It’s also newly restored and 200 m2 in size, and is going for 1.27 million euros.

These numbers imply that the gross rental yield in the city is about 1.9% per year. That’s if the property is fully rented, and without discounting any maintenance, agency fees, taxes, or other expenses. A more realistic net yield might be below 1%.

Considering that inflation in Spain is currently running around 3.5%, this means that property rental is a negative return business these days.

Consider also that property values are no longer rising, so owners can’t count on capital gain to overcome the negative real yield of renting.

Finally, consider that for typical Barcelona salaries, apartment rent of 2000 euros is extremely high and out of reach for almost all single and even double earners.

This is a new economic reality for Spain, where people have become used to double-digit returns every year in the past decade for owning property. I’m not sure how quickly people will adjust, or even how they will do so.