Chile Forum

yea, what you get in terms of "expert" analysis will be fairly useless in Chile. You need to do a property by property appraisal to really get anything useful info about your particular situation. You might be able to get some real estate trends for the major cities and towns, but in rural areas you are going to need to spend a lot more time investigating. One of the odd things about Chile is that the real estate market overall is so unsophisticated that there is a sort of cultural resilience built in to the prices. People simply will not acknowledge there property is not worth that much, and many times do not recognize that their property is worth more than what they are selling it for. They know nothing of Global and national trends, and just do not care about them if they did.

Now, all that said, overall we have more or less seen prices go flat across Chile this year. Perhaps some slight rises in prices in popular areas, but nothing in the sense of the U.S. implosion of prices. The Chilean real estate markets in the central region have gone through a boom with major building in Santiago and such. There is still a shortage of office space in Santiago. We will see how the economic downturn plays in to this over the next 6 months or so. Lots of money moved in to Chile for safe haven investing and development.

Agricultural properties have been very hot because of the increase in commodity prices around the World. The South has been fairly flat, in part I believe because of the way the peso dollar moved last year in terms of both foreigners being interested, hot markets in the central region, and some of the exporters getting pounded by the 450 or so exchange rate. That seems to have suddenly been changing now that we are around 600 pesos to the dollar. I suspect it will take a year or so for that news to trickle in to the prices, if it ever does in the more rural areas. People live in a peso economy here. Again, the local culture and national perception of place means more than economics often in real estate prices in Chile.

yea, there is normally a terrible disconnect between what people list properties for, what people offer for the property, and what properties are really moving at. People will put absurd prices on their property, and then scratch their head for why no one even looks at the property over the course of years. You want to move a property, lower the price about 10 to 20% under what everyone else is listing their properties. We try to explain this to Chileans that are in a hurry to sell, and they just don't get it. After a year or two they inevitably come back with a bit more reality check and lower their price after not getting a single buyer to look at it.

Here is an article I wrote trying to explain some of it:

http://www.allsouthernchile.com/southam ... chile.html

Some contacts of contacts we have with experts in the residential real estate markets in Santiago are expecting about a 10 to 20% decline in prices in Santiago to set in the next 12 months.