Real estate woes harming Spanish economic recovery

Underlying problems in the Spanish real estate market are harming the fragile economic recovery in the country.

Spain currently has the highest unemployment rate in the eurozone at around 20 per cent, with most of the jobs lost during the crisis from the construction sector.

According to an article by the AFP, building in suburbs, the country and on the coast was the "engine" of the economy over the past decade.

"In the last eight years, two-thirds of the homes built in Europe were in Spain," Christian Palau, director of the online real estate advertising site Fotocasa, told the news provider.

Indeed, since 2000, Spain has been building around 700,000 new homes each year - as many as in France, Germany and Britain combined.

Recently, the market appeared to regain some health as sales jumped by 30 per cent in August and prices over the course of the third quarter of this year only dropped 3.4 per cent from a year earlier, official data has revealed.

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