Idle Thoughts

So there I was, sitting at home in England, hacking around on the web and thinking I had a pretty good idea of the house I wanted to buy. After reading a lot of websites about the buying process, the nightmares, other peoples’ experiences and guides to various areas I reckoned I knew the what, the where and the price. All I had to do next was to find the actual house itself.

Agents on the net

Before I went, I spent a lot of time looking through the listings of spanish estate agents in the areas I was interested in. Strangely, a lot of the properties I enquired about turned out not to be available. Later I realised that there’s a significant element of “bait and switch” to some agents’ approach. They put some very attractive properties on their websites so you make contact, then try to sell you the places they actually have for sale.

Balancing dark skies with amenities

To get a location that has the darkest skies possible, the house would need to be away from large population centres. While this makes a place great for astronomy, the lack of people brings issues of its own. The first one being that the choice of property becomes rather limited and the availabilty of skilled builders to renovate a house can be a problem. It also occured to me that the dismissive phrases (”yes, of course” and “it’s no problem”) used when I enquired about the ease of obtaining planning permission to rebuild a ruin like the one shown above, were unlikely to be that simple in practice. Even when I was assured that the agents “knew a very reliable builder” and “had renovated loads of houses” I was suspicious: if it was that easy, why hadn’t someone already snapped up the bargains I was being shown? I had read some horror stories on the web before I came out about people coming out in a holiday frame-of-mind. Buying a ruin with some romantic notions of doing it up and running into deep trouble when they realise just how much work is needed, just how much it will all cost and the length of time both the paperwork/permissions take to come through and the duration of the the building work itself. Especially when they have no experience of housebuilding, nor speak the language, nor have anywhere else to live while the work is going on. Sometimes it’s good to know your limitations.

The Spanish house market

While I am no expert, it seems to me there are basic differences between the British and Spanish property markets, at least as far as brits buying in Spain are concerned

In the UK, we are used to the idea that a person, or family, owns one house. They live in it full-time and only move when they have a need: maybe for a larger/smaller house, or a different location. In the urban areas where most of us live, there is also a certain uniformity to the houses. As a consequence it is easy to compare properties and to form a view on the relative worth of potential purchases.
In the areas of Spain where I was looking, things are a bit different. First of all, most of the properties “for sale” are either vacant or used infrequently. Secondly, the range of properties, their state of repair and the availability of amenities such as water, power and even proper roads means that comparisons are much harder to make. I put “for sale” in quotes because I found that my british understanding was not quite the same as the realities of Spain, where a property can spend many years on estate agents’ books before someone comes along with an offer that the owner (or owners. Several people can part-own a single property - and they all have to agree to sell) will accept. The pressure to sell in order to buy the house you actually want is often not present and therefore sellers are in no hurry to take discounted offers.

Cost of buying

There are also distortions to the market from the taxes payable and the cost of selling a property. In short, after you’ve bought a house you will need to get about 13% more than you paid for it, just to break even. That’s assuming you don’t have to pay the spanish capital gains tax. As the next section shows, there are far fewer pressures on rural house prices than a british buyer (or seller) might expect. When this is combined with the taxes/costs involved you can see why the market in rural Spain runs on years rather than weeks.

One more thing is about supply and demand. In the UK we’re used to the idea that house prices will inevitably rise over time. The reason being that as a country we’re building 160,000 houses per year, but the demand is for 200,000. In rural Spain, the reverse is true. During the 1960’s and 70’s there was a large migration away from rural areas to cities and the coast, where tourism was starting to take off. This left large numbers of houses that nobody wanted, or lived in. It also meant there was no natural driver to push house prices. Since then, a lot of houses have fallen into disrepair, which has reduced the supply and foreigners are moving into the area which increases demand. However, the effect is still nothing like as frenetic as in the UK, so there is no natural tendency for house prices to rise.

Viewings

This turned out to be hard work. Apart from the sheer number of properties I had intended to view, the distances involved were quite large, too. Since I was not fixed to a specific location I ended up looking at houses over a range of about 100 miles. Because of this, I decided to spend either whole or half days with various agents, rather than arrange one viewing here and another one there. This meant I could often leave my car at the agent’s office and have them drive me around. On the downside, it was also difficult to get away if it was obvious that they were showing me unsuitable locations or houses.In the end, over the course of the week I view something over 50 houses. I whittled my shortlist down to about 3 probables and a few more possibles. After that it was a case of going back to confirm my first impressions, and to ask all the questions I had forgotten or assumed the first time around. In rural Spain, I found you should take nothing for granted. If a house description does not say it has water, or electricity, then it’s a fair bet it has neither. Phrases like “water close by” also means the house has no supply. I also discovered that very few properties came with a phone line. Telefonica (the monopoly phone company) has a radio-system for remote houses to have a voice-only phone, but it’s no good for internet. You should also take your mobile phone along and make sure there is a signal. I quickly found out that cave-houses have absolutely no prospect of receiving mobile signals inside their 5-foot thick walls.

So what did you get?

After all the activity of a week spent viewing, the house that fulfilled all my requirements for space, accessibility with remoteness - but not too remote, all the basic services (except a phone line) and affordability, was a cave-house near the village of Benamaurel (pop. 1800) in the north-east corner of Granada province in Andalucia.



The corral and unreformed caves (sans animals) are to the right. The main rooms of the house go back into the hillside and the garage is to the extreme left, obscured by trees. The whole plot is about 3000 square metres (about 3/4 acre) and the house itself is all one one level and consists of: kitchen, bathroom, hallway, living room, 2 bedrooms. In the extension there is another “living” sized room (6 * 3m) and above that is my office/playroom. The total livable space is about 110 square metres, with another 30-40 in the unreformed parts.