Idle Thoughts

Disclaimer

Before we start, I am not a solicitor. None of the things I say here would stand in a court of law and you should validate everything yourself. On no account take any actions and especially don’t pay anyone any money based on what you read here. This is all based on my experiences in rural Andalucia, practices and procedures are probably different in other parts of the country.

Consider how you buy a car.
Find one you like, check it’s OK, negotiate a price (get the finance) and do the deal. Well, that’s pretty much how you buy a house in Spain. The safeguards and guarantees are about the same, too. Now that’s not to say that everyone is out to rip you off, just that you do have to take responsibility for your own decisions and actions.

Your solicitor

The role of your solicitor is primarily to draw up the contract, ensure the various authorities are notifed of the sale and present you with the bill. There’s no concept of conveyancing as such, so provided the seller is empowered to sell the property and you have the money (or arrange a mortgage) there’s very little to stand between you and your new house. There are a few things that you will need to be aware of though. The first is that a lot of old spanish houses do not have anything like deeds, so your solicitor may have to do some digging through local records or something more inventive to prove that the house actually does exist and that it’s legal for you to buy it. (This legality thing is a big issue in Spain, a lot of houses are built on land classified as “rural”. You can’t just buy a plot and build a house on it - as a lot of brits are finding to their cost.) This can take some time, due to the obscurity of old documents. One other point is that houses can have debts attached to them - if you buy the house, you become responsible for the debt. Your solicitor has a duty of care to tell you about any debts that the house may have against it.

If you are expecting your solicitor to do all the dealing with the vendor, you will be in for a surprise. There’s a significant view of “it’s not my job” in Spain, even with profession people, they will often tell you “no”. Also in rural Spain (I don’t know about city life) you will probably not be able to get a structural survey on your house. The reason is that there are no surveyors! If you see cracks running down the walls or across the ceilings, you may be able to pay a builder to take a look - but they are not going to accept liability for what they tell you and I’d be very surprised if they would commit anything to paper.

One piece of advice you will hear over and over again is not to use a solicitor from the estate agency. As usual with advice, I ignored this - which turned out to be a big mistake! You will have worked out from the above that the role of a solicitor is primarily to make sure the paperwork is in order. As such a lot of the people who feel qualified to do this are simply administrators (or gestors in spanish) with little or no legal training. Gestors have been invented as a way for ordinary people to get through the labyrinthine spanish bureaucracy. They know what forms to fill in and the information needed to get past the office workers whose main function seems to be to request documents you don’t have. So while a gestor can fill in all the paperwork involved with transferring ownership of a house, he or she won’t have the ability or inclination to offer advice or take the initiative: they’ll simply wait for the machinery of local government to grind through.The individual I was put in touch with by the estate agents had a small understanding of english (infinitely better than my spanish, but still lacking in some crucial areas) and preferred to communicate via email. I thought the email idea was great …. until I didn’t get any. After making my offer, and having it accepted, the estate agents, their interpreter, the “solicitor” and I all trouped up to the Notary’s office. I needed an NIE (sort of national insurance number, without which I was not known to the tax system). The trip to the Notary was to grant the solicitor power of attorney, so she could sign documents on my behalf, get my NIE and do all the paperwork on the house purchase. With that in progress, I happily went back to England, and waited.
And waited.After about a month I got a one line email, in capitals:
THERES A PROBLEM WITH THE HOUSE
which did nothing to increase my confidence. A rather panicky phone call to the agents revealed no more information, except the good news that my NIE had come through some time ago - shame no-one had thought to tell me this. Some days later it transpired that the PROBLEM was that the house, being old and rural, was not registered with the land agency - not an uncommon situation. Despite all my efforts: email, phone, threats to the agents, I could not get any more information. I didn’t know where I stood, couldn’t find out what was going on or even what options were open to me. Fortunately I hadn’t handed over a deposit. Being a cash buyer I reckoned that there would be no delays as I didn’t need to get a mortgage, so the deal would go through quickly. Ha!

Victorio to the rescue

On one of my shopping days, the agent I was with made a comment that, at the time, I had just grunted acknowledgement to. He said that he had an absolutely brilliant solicitor who handled all his customers. Maybe it was time to take some action of my own. A quick call to the agent in question got the name and phone number of the brilliant solicitor. Not only did he answer my call (in very good english), but he was able to put my mind at rest about the sort of situation I was facing. Even better, he was willing to pick up the pieces of my purchase from my somewhat email-shy solicitor.True to form, when I called her up I couldn’t get an answer on her phone. Emails went unanswered too. As a last resort I phoned the agent (remember about agents and “their” solicitors being rather cosy?) and told him that she was, effectively, sacked and that she should pass all the paperwork on to Victorio and send me the bill for the work she had done to date. Amazingly about an hour later I got the first and last phone call from her - surprised about all the fuss I was making and assuring me that she could sort it out. Now I’m not very experienced at giving someone the boot so it was a rather tense discussion, but I was steadfast. I gave her Victorio’s number and his address and told her to send him all the information she had. She also told me she’d need €50 for the work to date.A few days later, I got a call from Victorio. Everything was going to be OK. He’d got the paperwork through and put my mind at rest. He also told me what would happen and roughly how long it would all take: about a month. With this information I stared making plans for a trip to Spain at the beginning of December to complete the purchase. This step-up in the speed of the process caught the vendors by surprise.

When I had been looking around the house in September, we had noticed (it was hard not to) that there were chickens in a henhouse in the corral, and two pigs living in one of the unreformed caves adjacent to the house itself. “Oh aren’t they sweet” exclaimed the agent’s vegetarian daughter. The owner retorted, through our interpreter, that the pigs were “for christmas”. Now, without going into the details of the matanza come the time I bought the house, the pigs were no longer there - but there was a great deal of ham hanging up to cure in the house itself.

Since the owner was sure that the sale would take much longer, they had left the meat in the cool dry environment and were adamant that it couldn’t be moved for 6 weeks. Since I was not intending to live there permanently and had no plans for a winter visit, my only stipulation was that there should be no trace (or smell) of it after that time.

Honour role For work above and beyond the call of duty and for being a nice guy, too. If you are buying a rural house in the Baza area and want a good solicitor, get in touch with Victorio through his website.