Thread: Building trade?

Is the building trade still booming in spain? Cause a freind a of mine was looking into moving over spain with his plastering business and me to go with with my online business. I heard alot of builders did go over there though in 2000 just wanting to know if they flooded the market there or not?

Building in Spain at the moment is DEAD...the immigrants that came to work in the boom time are going home, the Spanish that were in the building trade are out of work etc Of course there will always be people needing their homes renovated, and its usually word of mouth for building work....all in all not a good time.

Yes, I can only agree with that. Even the Spanish are losing there jobs in the construction industry. I was only reading this lunchtime about a Spanish lady who's husband has lost his job and she is having to go to the charity which supplies food to poor families as she cannot afford to feed the kids and pay the rent as well!!!

Just look around at the skyline. A year ago it was littered with cranes and the roads were clogged with cement lorries, building materials being transported etc.

Now the cranes have gone and the roads are clear of these vehicles.

Interesting post about the cranes. It is a good sign. Even in Sitges which is the only place in Catalunya where prices have gone up as opposed to down, I have noticed since May when we moved here there are now fewer cranes than before. Some of the developments have stopped work. Plastering though doesn't neccessarily rely on new builds alone. So bear that in mind. good luck.

After living in spain for 18 years and hearing many brit tradesmen say they are plasters, brickies, chippies etc... I have to say that many of the people who wish to work here have little or no hope of finding work in their field.
Brickies have to compete with anybody who can hold a trowel. most of the work here is rendered and the brick/blockwork just thrown up.
Chippies have problems becuse the doors and windows here, when not made of aluminium, arrive complete with hinges, handles and frames fitted.
Plasteres..... we have all worked at some time with spanish plasters ie yesso.

Regarding work, I run a damp proofing buisiness and taking in to account the amount of damp houses in spain I should be run off my feet, but I'm having to travel (Last job was in La Coruña, I live on the south coast, 1100kms).
Before packing up and comming,people need to take a serious look at the job market and investigate fully the situation here.

Cheers
Jeff

One of our spanish neighbours who is a plumber by trade (used to do large jobs on new build sites) has had to go do Dubai to get work.....and even out there work is drying up.

I live in Andalusia, and the main problem here is one that has gradually been affecting the building trade and bringing it to breaking point since about 2002. That is the change in law, making the building of residential houses in the countryside basically illegal. The rules say you need 25,000m2 to build a house, on 'rustic' land in the countryside, but even then, you have to prove that you need to live there in order to work the land. Even that used to be easy - the architect just produces are report explaining some standard stuff about use of the land and production projections, but now it is practically impossible. Then the police have become hotter and hotter in prosecuting anyone building such houses without the proper paperwork, or building them as barns, that are really houses. All this was bringing the building industry to its knees, long before the financial crisis in the world brought demant to a halt, which has consequently stopped all the building work on developmetns and apartments around the towns and along the coasts in Spain. I think that it is good to control the amount of building in the countryside, but surely they have gone too far! I was listening to a debate on SER Andalucia radio, and the polititians were all talking about the need to get major public works started in order to get building companies back to work, and injecting money into the industry, but it just strikes me that if they relaxed the law on building houses in the countryside a LITTLE, then the small and medium sized builders would quickly be back at work. Rather than saying a definitive NO to any building in the countryside, why don't they make some sensible rules, such as, you need x amoutn of square metres, and you must plant x amount of productive trees per x square metres, and these MUST be looked after (that would mean, in the case of foreigners, possibly employing locals to work the land - that's MORE employment created!), and you have to put in solar power, etc etc. Anyone have an opinion on this subject?

Things aren't looking too good in the building trade here. There are a million brand new housing units sitting idle in Spain and the banks have called last orders on mortgage borrowing for the time being.

I guess the glimmer of hope will be in a year or two (probably three) when it's time to take all these unused new units out of mothballs and put them back onto the market. Standing empty will have left them begging for extra work to be done just to get them marketable again.

Here in Valladolid there are vast tracts of new residential areas that are just sitting there waiting for the tide to turn. Friends of mine that have been pumping money into holes in the ground, waiting for building to start, have now been told they'll be lucky if they see some of their money back. Unemployment in the building trade in Castilla y León is now running into the tens of thousands.

The Spanish dream is not one of having a house in the country and a short or even longish commute into town. Here, the provincial villages are crumbling to dust, left to house the last few grandparents who don't want to leave for the city. "Mi pueblo" is a fiction the Spanish live in summer. No young Spaniard would ever dream of working the land, not even as a farm manager on a large farm, let alone with just enough land to subsist on forestry or crops and livestock that can only be profitable through participating in cooperatives that have to suck up to the hypermarket buyers.

Things might be very different down on the Med - I get the impression they are - but rural Spain in the north and north west is just waiting for a paradigm shift: the end of this generation that has sought urban life and turned its back totally on rural sustainability.