post belongs to the following thread: Habitation licence
For a property to be completed it has to be acceptable as a building and within planning permission. Very briefly, the Architect provides the Building Completion Licence through his Colegio, which confirms that the building has been completed in compliance with the building regulations. Sometime! errors are subsequently found and the licence has to be reviewed retrospectively. That licence is then submitted to the Town Hall who then review the property and confirm that all is correct within the planning process by issuing a First Occupation Licence (FOL). (Habitation Certificate). Only then can the property have its own individual connection to the water and electricity supplies. A developer, no matter what the contract states, cannot force anybody to pay for their property if it does not have its FOL. There can be months of delays in obtaining that, not being the developers fault, but due to under staffing at the Town Hall. Some developers have tried using the policy of 'Administrative Silence' to obtain the FOL. This is a quirk of the Spanish law where if an administration does not reply to a request within three months, that request can be assumed to be approved. However, there are big questions as to whether that applies to FOL's and if the authorities do eventually inspect the property for any reason and find it doesn't comply, the assumed FOL will be invalidated. Best not to sign on the basis of that. Then their is the Catastral inspection that confirms the details of the property and registers it in the town Hall for local rates equivalent IBI and other tax matters. etc, etc.