Doom and gloom still echoes around the property forums

There have been plenty of comments on the property forums about the difficulty of selling in Spain at the moment but Bulgaria is emerging as another market where buyers have been desperately lowering prices and still not selling.

A large one bedroom apartment in Sunny Beach, one of the most popular Black Sea resorts at the time of the property boom in Bulgaria, is up for £45,000 but no offers. Another property investor has been trying to sell for two years, according to posts on the propertycommunity.com forum.

It is a classic case of too many apartments being built too quickly and where off-plan properties are cheaper. 'The market is very slow but not quite dead,' reports one estate agent.

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Other east European countries are also suffering and it would appear that some key developments in Prague have been badly hit by the global economic downturn. A number of property investors in the Central Park development have pulled out because of delays and the poor quality of construction. It is a pale shadow of what was conceived, according to posts on the propertysecrets.net forum.

This is also an interesting case of a developer being upfront with investors. Because of the delays those who have decided to pull out have received their payments back in full.

The posts also give an insight into what it really means to buy in a foreign country where they speak a different language and the culture is also different. One investors in the project said that the main reason he pulled out was because of the delays and the fact that is was 'not a patch' on what had been promised in the brochure.

But Alison also points out that as an investor in a foreign country she was put off by exchange rates, difficulties in obtaining a long term mortgage, slow communications, unfamiliarity with the Czech tax system and – wait for it – 'a dislike of being fined in Prague for small, unintentional traffic offences'.

You would think that there would be plenty of bargain foreclosed properties for US real estate investors but a glance at the biggerpockets.com forum show that many are looking beyond their own shores with a number of interesting possibilities being discussed.

Germany, Moldovia, Costa Rica, Mexico and South Africa all emerge as destinations which US property investors are considering. Mexico has always been a popular location for US property investors, especially those seeking to retire there.

In India everyone seems to be expecting further property price crashes. Falls of up to 50% are being talked about on the indianrealestateforum. It is pretty gloomy reading with predictions that the world economic downturn is going to have a worse affect on India than many people predict.

Job cuts, salary cuts, fiscal defecits, and crashing exports are all reasons for thinking any recovery in the Indian real estate market is still some time away. Indeed there are those on the forum who think that recovery could be three or fours years from now.

There is also an indication that prices are still too high for buyers to start returning to the market in any great numbers. According to one poster sellers are still asking 2008 and even 2007 prices which he describes as 'crazy'. He blames brokers for not encouraging sellers to lower their prices.