Colin Murphy

Don´t forget - Florida isn´t a giant property bubble like Dubai.

As you might expect, lenders in the USA hate the fact that a person can choose to walk away from their mortgage. There is no law against doing it. These lenders are lobbying HARD to get the rules changed so that people don´t have an incentive to walk away. For example, they´d like it if a strategic defaulter couldn´t get another loan for 20-30 years instead of 3-7 years. That would prevent a lot of them from doing it.

A strategic default is when a person decides to stop repaying their mortgage even when they can afford to continue doing so. Why would somebody do that? You´ll lose your home and your good credit history will be badly damaged.

When the financial crisis first hit in 2008, the economic and political collaboration between Europe & America was unprecedented. That isn´t happening anymore.

Let´s get the bad news out of the way first. The views I expressed on Ireland and Spain in the Xmas newsletter in December 2009 have not changed one iota. Both are high risk - low return investment destinations and I can´t see that changing in the near term (it will eventually).

As mentioned above, we did actually view one property that my friend is going to put an offer on. In my opinion, he has found pretty much the only type of property I would ever encourage an investor in coastal Spain to purchase.

In the late 1990s, enormous wealth was being transferred from venerable pension funds to Silicon Valley kids in their early twenties setting up overvalued dotcoms. I was a 20 something in San Francisco at the time and even at that tender age I couldn´t believe what was happening in front of my eyes.

Last week a friend of mine showed me his new ipad. It was an impressive gadget and after checking out their eyewatering sales estimates I couldn´t help but take my hat off to Steve Jobs for anticipating demand ahead of the curve for yet another blockbuster device.

The above headlines might seem nonsensical when put beside each other, but the reason these respected organizations are giving US housing a big thumbs up in one month and a big thumbs down just a few short weeks later is easy to explain. They are looking at housing trends over a period of weeks rather than months or years.

Spain is a very beautiful country and it had one of the biggest real estate booms ever seen. I get asked about it all the time by investors who like the idea of purchasing a great value property there.