On Wednesday the 4th Marbella Meeting Point (MMP) congress started off at the town’s Palacio de Congresos. A full programme of lectures and meetings on all subjects concerning residential tourism has been organised for the entire congress which continues until this Saturday.
Many of the guests are also enjoying a variety of extra activities organised to coincide with the congress. These started with a “President’s Dinner” on Wednesday, hosted by Mayor Marisol Yague, for the heads of 100 investment and residential tourism companies from all over Europe. The pace was kept up on Thursday when many of the estimated 12,000 people attending the event enjoyed an “Inaugural Fiesta” at the Olivia Valere discotheque. A tournament has also been organised for golfing participants at one of the world’s most exclusive clubs, Los Flamingos. These events, plus the fact that potential buyers attending the MMP were lodged free of charge in five-star hotels, sets the event apart from other real estate fairs.
During the day, however, participants got down to the serious business of analysing trends in the so-called residential tourism sector. Of the estimate 180,000 second homes that will be built every year in Spain until 2008, at least half will be bought by foreigners. Of this half, 50 per cent will be bought by Britons, the Germans will buy 22 per cent and the French, Italians, Scandinavians and Belgians will buy the rest.
The other half will be bought by Spaniards, mainly from Madrid, Cataluña, Andalucía and Valencia. According to the president of MMP, Enrique Lacalle, in 2003 foreign tourists invested just over seven million euros in the purchase of second homes along the Costa del Sol, a 16 per cent increase over the previous year. The second homes sector has grown by three per cent annually during the last ten years and it now represents 18 per cent of all homes in Spain, that is, nearly four million of the total of the 22 million homes which are currently registered.
The MMP, which ends on April 24th, is the only event of its kind that concentrates on the second homes sector, and one of its major attractions is that investors and prospective buyers can visit many of the residential complexes on site.
Its keynote speaker was Melvin Villaroel, considered the guru of residential tourism architecture in Spain. His first tourism project was the “Puente Romano”, which was built in 1974. He has developed another 60 projects since then, the last one being the Hotel Adeje in Tenerife.
Courtesy of Sur in English
www.surinenglish.com
