No End In Sight For Pummeled Spanish Housing Market; Prices Fall At A Record Pace In Q1

Spanish home prices plummeted 14.3 percent in the first quarter compared to the same quarter last year, the biggest drop since Madrid began tracking quarterly home prices in 2007, according to stats released Thursday by the National Statistics Institute.

Prices fell 6.6 percent from the last three months of 2012, showing that Spain isn’t even close to rebounding as banks continue to eschew lending to the few borrowers in Spain willing to take out home loans right now.

Home prices have fallen 40 percent since the start of the European sovereign debt crisis. Spanish banks were forced to write off billions of euros of bad loans when the country’s’ real estate market crashed.

Spain's Sareb was created earlier this year to hold the assets of four nationalized banks as part of the ordered restructuring of the country’s financial institutions. It wants to sell €1.5 billion in ($2 billion) in homes this year but has failed to make much progress.

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