carcuscrae

Hi All

Sorry for this message but my partner & I are considering moving to Spain and would like some advice about buying a property.

I know the Spanish market is awash with properties at the moment and there are so many sites out there it is hard to know where to start.

Basically can anyone suggest the best areas to buy in, we don't want to live in a ghost town, so we don't want to consider properties in areas where there are more empty properties than full ones.

Secondly can anyone recommend some good/legit property sites to search that anyone has used to find a property.

Many Thanks

jay01

Trawl through previous posts with regards to property in Spain at the moment, best advice would be forget buying blind, move out and rent first for at least the first 12 months as I doubt the property deluge will suddenly disappear and that gives you time to look at what you are buying as often what you think you want is very different from what you actually need or end up with.

A house is often for life in Spain as they do not move particularly quick so take your time and do not believe anything an agent says, always question what is told to you and when you find one you like visit it lots of times at different times of day and talk to neighbours, what is a dry river in summer may be flooding during the winter, quiet during the day may have a noisy bar near at night and consider your age as you will be tying up money in equity and it is a renters market, there are really good properties at low rentals so there is NO HURRY to buy invest and live off the returns for a few years.

Main advice take your time, do your research, do more research and go into it with your eyes open, Spain has lots of issues at the moment so if your banking on working to support you stay in the UK.

Alpujarra

A general comment that may help you. Over the years I have noticed that there has been more trouble with new property than with old. So My advice would be

• first find a town you like - only you can do that not people on a forum

• Then look for property that's mature ie older than would be expected to be involved in some developer/ayuntamiento scam.

Library Ticket

How old would a property need to be to be in that category?

Dick Dasterdly

In which case be sure to stay outside of the known earthquake zones, as the older ones are probably not designed to handle them.
I noticed a few such properties were damaged just last week by minor tremors.

Alpujarra

Impossible to specify I know, but the type of property I mean would be obviously mature, not being sold by a developer, and be part of a community established for say, more than 50 years. ie a typical house in town centre or village or old rural property.

sensationalfrog

what absolute rubbish,here on the cds there are loads of bargains to be had,just as said find an area you like,rent for a bit then buy a place you like,its easy,all this crap about the spanish housing market doestn't help,and now we have earthquakes
lol,yeh 3.9 or something,1 brit shit paper prints something and you think an eq is coming tomorrow

Mitzyboy

Err ... or maybe get yourself a good independent solicitor just as you would if you were living in the UK and get everything checked out properly. A new property doesnt have to be involved in a developer scam

lynnxa

true - & being on an older urb doesn't make it immune to problems either

I knew some people who did just as suggested - bought a 40+ year old house on an old established urb

planning permission was given to build a new urb further up the hill & the access road went straight through this old urb - these people & some of their neighbours all lost part of their land & had to pay for the priviledge under the LRAU thingy

I know that's not quite the same as discovering that your house is illegal - but it still caused financial hardship & untold stress

missile

Some older properties come with their own unique legal problems. They do have character and charm which can be appealing but I would suggest modern properties are better built.

Any decent solicitor will help you avoid buying a house with legal issues. All of the people I know who bought property with legal issues were well aware but thought they could somehow get round the spanish system.

johnnyone

We had no problems whatsoever when buying our house, the whole process took 4/5 weeks.

I think the reasons for that were:-

i) Old house (c1887) in established town, so no boundary disputes or possible land grab problems

ii) Helpful established Estate Agent.

iii) Good local Lawyer recommended by the Estate Agent.

iv) Luck. We did not know ii) and iii) from Adam when we started the process, although I did check out the Lawyer through another source.

sensationalfrog

iii) Good local Lawyer recommended by the Estate Agent

that is the worst thing you can ever do

sorry just read point v,fair enough