Is it costom and practice for spanish solicitors to open a spanish bank account for you before you move over there ?

No.


Some will do it for you if you ask though - they may need power-of-attorney now.

That's what we did when buying. The lawyer set up the bank account, dds and also arranged our NIE's etc. All we did was pay and pick up the keys. Could not have been more straightforward.
He even retains PoA on our account for convenience.

Thanks very much for your reply johnnyone very helpful that's what our solicitor's have offered us we were just unsure about them having our bank account detail's with all the scam's about these day's.Once again thankyou

Thank's very much for your reply snikpoh our solicitor in Spain offered set up bank account to pay our direct debit's we just wondered if this was the norm.Again thank's for answering .

You can revoke the PoA on completion or, if you want total peace of mind change banks.
We have done neither but trust our lawyer.
The advice we acted upon, having been told by several people including the Lawyer was to change the locks asap as there are often numerous sets of keys held by various agents and the like.

Once again thanks very much for the advice Cheers

+1, that's excellent advice, and applies to anyone buying a new place, in any country.

The easiest thing to do is to restrict the PoA to specifically what you want them to do. These 'restricted PoA's are very common.

Letting the Solicitor keep the PoA open has other advantages too e.g. Completing appropriate forms and Payments of non-residents Property Tax to Authorities. Our Spanish Solicitor did everything for us when we purchased our property, we had to return to the UK but they obtained our NIE numbers, opened our bank accounts, set up our Utilities (Water & Electric) and Direct Debit Payments, set up our DD payment for annual IBA payments, organised our Spanish Wills (to British Inheritance Laws), absolutely superb service !!

We set up nothing with the solicitors. Some 5 years later we were going to do something via the lawyer that we had used previously and were very surprised when he said. "You don't have enough money in your account how are you going to pay" I told him it was none of his business, and that I no longer required his services. We closed the account which was in the wind anyway with some choice words to the manager and took the cash, depositing it in the new account.