A middle-class Brit who buys a home in Spain to retire in just got sold a property that was worth peanuts on the market not that long ago for a very large amount of money in the Spanish economy. Whoever sold it to them would have never sold it for the same amount of money to another person from the same location because we've embraced 'the market'. What you fail to touch on is that this Briton is importing not only their wealth, but also a lot of extra expenditure all of which benefits the local economy. The real burden is when they start leaning on the health care system, which wasn't made to cater to a bunch of aging foreigners and that will quickly turn the so-far net positive into a net negative, financially and service wise for everybody else.

Emigrating later in life to another - poorer - country is a burden on that poorer country that the immigrants did not pay into earlier in life. If you emigrate: do it when you're young enough to contribute to the system that you will rely on to support you when you're older. Otherwise you are just preying on the denizens of weaker economies (ok, they got the better deal with the weather). The housing market could be fixed, the economic disparity and subsequent service shortages can not, that money got left behind in the UK.