Chile Forum

The laundry list of why such stats would be meaningless would fill the forum (in some sense they already do).

Start with all those apartments under construction. Until they are finished and building permits and titles are issued, they are not really real estate under Chilean law; yet, most are sold green so they do impact the market. Trying to calculate how far behind each building is in delivery of those apartments in titles is nearly impossible. Same with the mass produced homes around Chile.

Then you have the social aspect. Just because there are say 2,000 houses built and sold in an area for say 20 million pesos each, does not mean that the market they were sold in to is the same market you are in or could ever be in ( There are red lines in Chile, just most foreigners would not be able to really detect them ). That is likly not even measurable.

Again, I would echo previous posters that have pointed out how meaningless those sorts of stats are everywhere else. Do you really believe the numbers being thrown around in the States? The b.s. scam market in the U.S. where no one is sure who owns what, or how much things are worth, sure seams the mark of mature real estate market.

obviously, if you give me a target property, and ask for a formal appraisal, we can tell you what things are worth in Chile. We have private appraisers that use the same numbers the banks go on (they have their own departments for internal stats for mortgages), along with a lot of other methods.

It is the national trends that are meaningless. If you think you can somehow crunch the numbers based on whatever stats, see some trend that the big money in Chile has not already seen, then you are fooling yourself. By the time you see a trend that might equate to an opportunity in an area based on one of those stats, I am fairly sure someone else has already exploited it and moved on. For example, they built another 5 high rises, sold them all green, and by the time you get there the market is saturated with unregistered properties that will come on the market shortly but do not yet count in the stats. The flip side of that is, I can not even count the number of foreigners (and Chileans) that have come in to markets, bought early thinking the place was about to take off and 10 years later they are still sitting on their speculation properties that have hardly moved in price.