Did I say $10,000? I meant $100,000? My bad.

One of the perennial scams of the Buenos Aires real estate market has long been to underreport the value of the property one is buying/selling in order to avoid paying taxes. The two document sale--where there's a "real" receipt and an "official" one--was accepted enough that "How much should we make this out for?" was considered not a dishonest question, but a rational and intelligent one. So when the government decided to put in various safeguards to ensure that the real value was noted--and the real taxes paid--it sent a shudder through some real estate agents who claimed such enforced honesty would kill the local real estate market. Well, the first results under the new laws are in, and they're fairly telling. After two months of falling reported values (down 10.9% and 39.5%) due, presumably, to the slowing pace of the real estate boom, the value reported in March jumped 73.8%. And year-over-year, while there were only 2.9% more sales, the value of the sales jumped 41.2%. Either the average property value has jumped over 40% in a year, or somebody wasn't exactly telling the truth last year. As one analyst in the story said, ""Se producen escrituraciones por montos más cercanos a los reales." ("This has produced filings for amounts closer to reality.")