Buying Property in Spain

Buying a property or building land in Spain is different to buying in the UK and therefore it is essential you engage professional people to represent you. Unlike the UK where your solicitor will carry out all the searches necessary to discover any encumbrances there may be attached to the property, in Spain the lawyer in most cases will only check out the legal status, i.e. charges or embargos recorded on the property register. It's worth noting that in Spain debts incurred by the previous owner relating to the property, unpaid community taxes for example, will be passed to the new owner.

Generally speaking a Spanish Lawyer would not normally make enquiries with the local planning authorities in order to discover whether there were any plans that may affect the property in the future.

For example a Lawyer involved in a property purchase would ensure that there were no outstanding mortgages or other encumbrances and that the seller was the legal owner of the property and, therefore, had the right to sell. However, it is unlikely he would discover that the town hall had a plan to route a new highway close to the house and as a consequence would require you to give up 2 metres of your garden! Or as we discovered in a recent case when the previous owner had made illegal reformations to the property leaving outstanding fines in the Town Hall for the new owner to deal with.

Recently the Sunday Times reported a number of horror stories regarding people who had bought houses in areas that were situated in urban land and which later became part of a plan parcial (an urbanization plan). In these cases property owners were required to raise huge sums of money in order to contribute to new roads, and infrastructure, or lose their houses. It is very, very important to have this particular potentially devastating circumstance checked out before proceeding with any purchase. The LRAU is a very unpopular law with many opponents, however whatever our opinion may be, it is the law and as residents or property owners in Spain we have to be aware of it and respect it's existance. If you want to learn more about the opposition to this law visit this website.

Having chosen your Spanish property or plot and had both the legal status confirmed and a satisfactory search report received from the local municipal planning department the next step is to have an independent survey of the property. This very important aspect is often overlooked by purchasers particularly those who buy through an estate agent. In the case of a resale property, the surveyor will carry out a full structural survey and report any structural weakness, defect or signs of subsidence.

Finally, you should obtain an independent valuation of the property or land to ensure that it is not excessively over priced.