Buying a Home in Spain? Well, Buyer Beware
I mentioned on this blog sometime before Christmas that my wife and I were in the market for a home on the Costa Blanca. Well, here is what I learned from my home buying process in Spain.
Buyer Beware
My wife and I were in the market for a second hand home in a non-touristy area of the Costa Blanca, an area where we had been living for the last few years, in fact.
We knew the area well, had been window shopping for quite some time, so we were well informed about prices and the different options available. We were also well informed about the shady reputation that Spanish estate agents have won for themselves over the years.
With the property boom in Spain and the Costa Blanca in particular, there have been many property scams and the like. The kicker for me is that anyone can open a real estate agency in Spain. No licensing, no nothing. In fact, a friend of ours who owns a commercial location told us that she had someone interested in renting the space, but was undecided what she was going to put there: a "big and tall" or an estate agency.
Anyway, we hooked up with a local agent who we had talked to a few times over the years, and who we trusted. This turned out to be a mistake, as in the end she managed to get us in between a rock and a hard place. This was mostly due to some seriously bad judgement on our part, but in the end we got lucky, landing a place that we shouldn't have been able to put an offer on (long shady story there) and the agent dropped their commission by a fair margin.
So we were very lucky.
My Advice
For starters, do not implicitly trust an estate agent, even more so if they are independent. Have an independent lawyer look over your contract, use an escrow account for the financial transactions: they are laid back here, but you need to cover your butt!
Do not sign anything until you are clear what it is about - I saw one guy signing documents in the agencies office without even reading them - we spoke with him at the cafe next door one day and he told us about how he had gotten ripped off previously, and I'm not surprised. But this isn't uncommon here in Spain - sneaky agents will try and get sellers to sign exclusives and buyers to sign for extra commissions.
There is more information out there, and if you are a native English speaker, "You and the Law in Spain" is a helpful book, I bought a copy at the airport.
It's not so bad
The truth is that it's not that bad buying here, you just need to go in with the same common sense as you would in any other country, keeping in mind that there is no official body here overlooking Estate Agencies and punishing them if they do something wrong.
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