There has been a large surge in people who are actively looking for a cheap property in Spain and other closely related keyphrases on the popular search engines ie.Google! Prospective buyers are savvy enough to know about the thousands of auction/repossessed on the Costas and the fact there many distressed owners that are taking a big hit on their property.
A word to the wise, Spanish property that is being repossessed has already been through the mill and the current owners have probably given up on overall maintainence and in some cases before the repossession concludes they can even remove everything and anything of value. This can mean no kitchen or appliances, light fittings, complete bathrooms missing etc. This obviously isn´t exclusive to Spain, you only have to watch Homes Under The Hammer to see the state some auction property ends up in.
Please always view any property you are considering through either repo or auction, don´t just take for granted what you are being told by an agent, even if pictures seem like the place is in reasonable condition. Make sure you give plenty of notice to the agent/bank to view as sometimes it can take up to 48 hours to gain entrance.
Is the property really a bargain? Don´t forget how much prices rose during the boom years and what may have originally been paid for the property could have been way over its true value anyway. In such cases 40-50% discounts from the original selling price mean nothing because of the ridiculously excessive original sales price.
This seems like a pretty negative post, but in fact there are some genuine bargains out there. Don´t just jump into anything unless you have done adequate research and then hopefully you will come across some real gems. Recently Nick Leslau the multi-millionaire property mogul commented recently that everyone thinks that in the current market conditions every distressed/repossessed deal presents a massive opportunity, but realistically there is a lot of rubbish out there. You have to look hard to find the "real" bargains. This comes from a man who has approximately 250m GBP to invest, so for those of us with more modest sums to invest, take heed!