Home Sweet Home!
F rom the very first time that you saw your future home and
throughout the negotiation process, you are most likely
daydreaming about the day you can move into it. You may
be counting the seconds until closing dag, planning the ways you will decorate it and how your family will settle into the new home. But remember there are still things to do and to check after your have been handed the key – make sure that you have insurance for your property, ensure all service contracts are in your name (telephone, water, electrics etc.) do we nee awill? and register your ownership of the property with your local Town Hall (Ayuntamiento) – all of which your lawyer or agent can help you do.
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Legal Process
Once you have found your property, the
purchase process begins with a reservation
agreement. This is a contract that freezes the
purchase price and takes property off the market for, usually, 30 days on payment of a fee between €3,000 and €12,000. The deposit is usually held by your lawyer or your agent in a client or escrow account. Within 10 days of signing the reservation agreement, the full private purchase contract (contrato de arras) is signed between the buyer and the seller. This is similar to exchanging contracts in the UK buying process. Within this time your lawyer should complete all the searches on the property - confirming that the seller own the property being sold, there are no mortgages or charges and that planning consents are in order. Once both parties sign the main contract, it is binding. The arras contract or full private contract will usually require a 10 to 20 per cent deposit to be paid. The buyer is then committed to pay the balance of the price, and the seller (once the money has been paid) must transfer ownership to the buyer. If the seller pulls out of the transaction he must return double the amount of the deposit received by way of compensation. If the buyer pulls out he will lose the deposit paid. The property sale is formally completed when the title deed (“Escritura de Compraventa”) is signed before a public official called a Public Notary, or Notario. This will happen at their office and be accompanied by the agreed final payment and all the relevant purchase taxes. The Escritura is then presented by the Notary to the Land Registry for registration and the property is passed to the new owner. Final registation of the title deed can take several months. With a new-build property, obviously completion can take a lot longer, and the payments are split over stages of the build process, and the developer should provide bank guarantees against each payment. This protects your payments in the event the developer fails to complete the property or goes bust.
General advise!
Make arrangements to receive notifications
An important issue for non-residents is how they receive their mail. In Spain official notifications are sent out to properties and are very rarely sent to a home address in another country. Some of these notifications can be very important and require action on your part. Some people ask a neighbor to keep an eye on their letterbox to retrieve any official looking post. If you don’t have some way of being alerted then the next stage is for the notification to be put in the BOE (Boletín Official del Estado) or local bulletin.
Keep a point of contact in Spain
If you are away from your property for any length of time you will be particularly anxious about security and access to your property. It can be that services need to enter your property whilst you are in your own country. Or you might want to arrange for someone to clean your Spanish house and air it before you come out for your holiday. Either way, you might want to engage the services of a key holder or someone who you can keep in contact with whilst in your own country. They will keep a set of keys and might also be able to help out if you have visitors using your property whilst you are away.
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