March - June 2009.
Just to fill you in on a bit of background as I´ve been treading the road to purchase for about six months now. I´ve split this section up into several parts to avoid each post becoming too long and boring.
Way, way back in March, and believe me it does feel like an age ago, a house I had for sale in the US had finally found a buyer and although completion would not be taking place for a while (as of writing it still hasn´t but, as they say, real soon now) the profit generated would allow us to buy something here in Spain without having to take on a mortgage. With house prices dropping and not being adversly affected by the credit crunch this seemed like a good, nay great, idea, at the time.
So being the kind of person that I am I wrote down our requirements in quite some detail and emailed them off to several local agents. That was my first mistake! We were inundated with properties for sale, not one of which matched the requirements I had set down, even the few which might have been OK at first glance and that we went to view turned out to be victims of estate agent speak and totally unsuitable or grossly overpriced. Wasting both their time and mine, but it did give me my first insight into the agent mentality, ´Sell anything, at any cost. Just sell it, then collect the commision´. By the way, that is some commision they are collecting, 6K or there abouts and for what?
HINT: When talking to an Agent remind them of Decreto 218 (2005)
So I scoured the internet (idealista.com and kyero.com I found to be the best) and took to taking long walks around town looking for likely places.
The agents I had been talking to seemed to take offence at this as one by one they stopped replying to my requests for information and after about two months stopped talking to me at all. I get the impression that it was a case of ´These are the properties which I am willing to sell you, take it or leave it´. Could it be that these were the properties they were making the most commision on?
We did find one place which suited our needs, a new apartment in a block that had just been reformed, the price had been just been lowered so we asked the seller for the paperwork. Which he duly supplied. At this time not knowing a Nota-Simple from a Fin de Obra I took this paperwork to the one agent I had come to trust a little, she at least seemed to be going out of her way to find us something, and asked her to check it out.
The first thing she did was to get on to the seller to make sure she could screw some commision out of him even after I had said I would pay her. Obviously the seller refused and she pronounced the paperwork incorrect. Now I know enough to check it myself, I have gone back over it and found it to be completely in order, a wonder in itself. Of course it is now too late and the place has been sold.
To be continued in Getting Here. Early July