Banana Beach is one of three holiday home schemes excluded from an initiative to stop a decade-long dispute over the legality of many developments in Marbella. This spring the town’s new mayor, Angeles Muñoz – who has vowed to end years of actual or alleged corruption involving former Marbella council chiefs and developers – announced that 18,000 “illegal” homes in the area would be given retrospective building licences, making them legal. But she said three schemes, including Banana Beach, would not be retrospectively licensed and would have to be demolished, probably next year.
Yet spanishpropertyworld.com, the website quoted above, still advertises flats at Banana Beach from €259,888 (£243,300). The website – which does not publish its telephone number – makes no reference to the demolition threat and has not answered Cash’s repeated emails on the subject.
A property portal, esmoz.com, is advertising all sizes of apartments at Banana Beach for sale, but has also failed to answer enquiries about the scheme. It describes Banana Beach as “a beautiful, luxury development of apartments right on the beach-front in Marbella. There are extensive leisure facilities and, of course, spectacular sea views”.
The agency Interealty, which is selling Banana Beach flats through esmoz.com, has also declined to respond to telephone and email enquiries about the ads.
A spokesman for the Marbella authorities says the mayor wanted to license retrospectively all illegal homes but this has been prevented by regional and national governments. One reason may be that, unlike most other schemes, Banana Beach, built in 1998, is only 100 metres from the sea and breaks an earlier development law that prevents homes being constructed so close to the coast.
Hundreds of existing owners at Banana Beach, many of them Britons, face their homes being demolished, with no compensation offered.
Russell Ellis and his wife, Lynn, from Sidmouth in Devon, own a two-bedroom apartment in the scheme. They paid €117,000 for it in 2003 as a retirement haven; they used an independent Spanish lawyer and saw for themselves documents issued by Marbella council apparently confirming the legality of the land and building work. “We knew of risks buying in Spain so we were taking no chances,” says Russell, a businessman.
After enjoying two summers in their holiday home they were told in 2005 that the entire Banana Beach complex was built illegally. The documents they had seen were part of a deal by corrupt council officials, some of whom are now in jail. Similar bad news was given to almost 20,000 owners in other schemes.
“For four years I’ve been writing to solicitors, councillors and officials in Marbella and Madrid. No one replies. No one puts anything in writing. It’s as if everything and everyone is corrupt and no one wants to commit to doing anything,” says Russell.
Although 20,000 homeowners have been left in limbo, the Marbella mayor’s attempts to re-plan the town and draw a line beneath the illegal building controversy are lauded by many property industry specialists.
“The investigations into corruption should serve the town well,” says Rhona Hutchinson, of Integrated Relocation Spain, a buying agency. “No longer will [building] licences be so easy to obtain. Lawyers, notaries and mortgage providers will no doubt make it their business to dig deep when conducting searches.”
All this has taken its toll on property prices in Marbella. Villas for the super-rich remain expensive but more modest homes have fared particularly badly.
“The worst affected sector is that of apartments and townhouses under €600,000, of which there’s a vast over-supply,” Hutchinson says. “Prices have dropped by up to 30%, with isolated sales at even greater reductions.”
Barbara Wood, of The Property Finders, another buying agency, says: “The planning mess has been hugely damaging to the market in Marbella. If a cash buyer can find a serious seller, then there’s every possibility of securing a purchase at 30% to 40% less than it would have been at 2007 prices.”
Both Wood and Hutchinson believe the mayor is sincere in her attempt to end corruption in the local council. That is little consolation to Russell and Lynn Ellis, who have not visited their Banana Beach flat for two years and have no desire to return before it is demolished, which they say might happen next year.
“You hear of so many scams and illegal events in the Spanish property market,” says Russell. “The EU has criticised Spain for its ‘land grabs’, buyers get stung by developers who do not build their homes and fail to return deposits, and developments like ours are declared illegal after we buy them. Yet no one in authority in Spain appears to do anything to end these activities.
“We don’t want to go back there again. We’ve had enough.”
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