Rob, you need to hire a "stager" to redecorate your house for sale.
No offense, but your furnishings are dated. If it looks like an Arbus picture it's because it looks of that period, which means attractive to people your age. By redecorating in a more contemporary style you open the market up to young families as well.
14 months without a nibble means something is seriously wrong. Either it's priced too high or it doesn't show well. I don't know the price but I do know it looks like it's from a bygone era.
I hope you take this in the spirit it's given. I think it looks lovely and comfortable, but I'm 56 years old and it feels like my parents house. That's how dated. Unless it's part of a senior community, you need to broaden it's market appeal to a "youthier" market if you want it to move.
No offence taken, and I agree with most of it, but it ain't gonna happen. In fact, I had to dress the place
down because of the risk of burglary etc. Due to pics remaining in agency windows for so long, it's a convenient, risk-free way of casing a joint...
Most of the people buying here (before many estate agencies went bust post '08) are retired, or about so to do; it's either second-home folks or as I said, people wanting to trade northern Europe for the expected sunshine. Younger folks with pots of loot will be looking at villas with pools, anyway, not thinking for a moment of the downside of all of that.
If you look at the glossy boat/lifestyle magazines about Spain, the places you see featured are either those of Spanish nobility/old money (traditional furniture) or swish holiday villas and apartments with glass/chrome everything, marble floors and no carpets. We started off believing we could hack it without fitted carpets, and for a couple of winters tried to do that. In the end we had to give in and get them installed throughout. The cold in winter is fearful, made even worse by the sea dampness that pervades everything. We are one huge step ahead of most here: the buildings were damp-proof coursed during construction: saw it happening. So any dampness is in the air, not from the ground.
The simple truth is, the property market here is dead, and will probably remain so for years, because they 'developed' hundreds of apartments, prior to the crash, that have never sold or even been looked at. As bad, estate agency fees are at least 5% and used to be much higher. So, unless you are selling because you don't expect to live long, and have no need to rebuy, you are faced with building in a massive over-price factor just to be able to buy again at somewhere vaguely near the same level as you are selling. In my case, I'd probably move to another country, thus losing even more taking the capital out of this country, and converting euros into pounds or whatever.
A recent newspaper article said that 10,000 German property owners in the Balearics were trying to sell, not because they were in any way cash-strapped, but because they objected to the Spanish level of taxation that would be applied to sale or inheritance.
I giggled at the 'parent's house' bit; age would put me exactly there! I expect that the solution will be that I peg out and then the family will perhaps just let it and get some income that way, which could be the best thing, in the longer term, as
I don't really have anything much to gain from moving unless I can move to Rome, but that would be even more expensive and precarious!
But, I'm not getting depressed about it: I still do the lottery!
;-)
Rob C