We bought our house in Iznajar five years ago but have now found out we cannot sell it. We dont really own it because the olive land it stands amidst was once part of the plot and legally it cant be segregated from the house. We have the title deeds but they remain unstamped by the land registry so we cant legally sell it.

Has any one else been through this and come out of the other side? It has happened to a few people in our area, but as far as I know no one has got it sorted. We are waiting for the council to turn down our latest application for segregation. This process should take a month, five months later and we still wait. Then our lawyer has advised us to let him speak to the previous owner and arrange for her to sell us a portion of the land so that we can legally sell the house!

What a palaver. It is disheartening when you have decided to move on and find that you dont even own your own house.

Most of this mess seems to have come from the office of a solicitor in Velez Malaga, a lot of people who bought their houses through him have got dodgy paperwork and cant sell.

I would be interested to hear if anyone else had experienced this.

And how do you hurry on the processing of your paperwork in a small rural council, our lawyers assistant regulary asks about our paperwork but just gets the same answer, it hasnt been completed yet...

Sorry to hear about this .... where abouts are you?
We had some segregation issues a while back which our solicitor sorted out

Thankyou for replying. We are in Iznajar, the Cordoba region, half an hour from Antequera.

What were your problems with this issue?

We are at the point where we would quite happily give the property away!
Dealing with issues like this is so tiring when you are ready to move on, trying to get a straight answer from the solicitor who got us in this mess, its like wading through treacle.

This is an awful situation for you to be in. Can you say how you managed to buy the house in the first place if this is the situation?

JJ

That's what I was going to ask. It was sold to you with the same situation, so surely you too can sell (use the same agents who sold you it in the first place!), albeit the value will no doubt be less than if it were "legal".

5 villas built on 3 plots
I'd say you need to find a new solicitor, for I can't see the one that got you into that mess getting you out of it easily

Thanks for your replies and interest in our plight.

Well thats the million dollar question! How were we able to buy it when the paperwork was not in order. We have asked our new solicitor similar questions, ie if everyone turned a blind eye to the discrepencies in the paperwork at the time we brought the house then why could a blind eye not be turned again when we wanted to sell? He found this funny and laughed and said in theory yes, but that in reality no solicitor or notary would approve our house for sale with the paperwork in the state its in. So, where do you go from there...

The solicitor who got us in this mess is from Velez Malaga. He seems to have looked the other way on a number of ocasions and managed to get a some of our neighbours into similar difficulties.

We are solidiering on and trying to be philosphical about it, ie it will get sorted one day. But how mad is it, you buy a house in good faith, go to what you believe is a reputable solicitor, trust the notary to be decent and honest and then get into a situation like this.

Neighbours who need to buy a piece of land that their house sits on before they can legally own and sell the property are in a similar plight. The previous owner wants 90,000 euros from them for a bit of scrub land that is good for nothing! They are trying to get a tourist licence which means that they wont need to have land with the house to legally own it. (This is hard for me to understand and I have had countless discussions about it, so bear with me, there's not a lot of what I would term logic going on here) However the tourist license was going to put them back 10,000 euros and they are going to have to put all sorts of modifications to their properties, wheel chair access, fire extingusihers etc.

So we all feel a bit stuffed at the moment, we are soldiering on alone, other friends are thinking of suing the notary if they cant get their paperwork sorted out. We are all in touch with eachother and keeping tabs on eachothers situations.

Reading some of the threads here makes you realise how you can get tangled up in these unforseen situations here. Its luck if it all goes well for you, as some one once said on here, even if you do all your homework and go through the proper channels things can go wrong....

Unfortunately I can't help but just wanted to send some good wishes and luck your way...

We have a problem at the moment with land.we bought 30thousand square metres have gone through all the channels properly all we were waiting for was the final stamp on the building licence.however the forrestry commision jumped in and objected saying a fire 10 years ago went on the land.law in spain says any fire started deliberatley has to be left 25 years as building companies were starting fires and then buying the land cheap. the solicitor who did our paper work told us there were no claim on the land .we would not have bought the land if we could not build on it.it appears the forrestry commision are a law upon themselves.the frustating thing is we have found out that two people have been given permission even though their land was in the centre of the fire.

Hi Janet. Have you tried posting with your problem on spanishpropertyinsight.com? There are a couple of Spanish lawyers who frequent that forum and give good advice.