23 Mar 2011 12:00 AM:

Hello

I was really hoping someone here might be able to advise us on what the best thing might be.  It’s a long story so I thought it best to give the key points first....then abit of background afterwards.

The keypoints:

We bought a house in entirely good faith in 1985.

There were complications and it was only in 2007 that we got the Escritura

Even so our house can’t be registered at the land registry. 

We desperately want to sell the house.

My questions:

(forgive if I sound stupid here) How much of a problem is not having the house registered at the land registry.

Is it something that would typically put people off from buying our house?

What would people here on this forum suggest or recommend?

The background:

It was back in 1985 at a time when they were lots of horror stories of Brits going to Spain to buy an property. In our case my late father put down £7,000.00 deposit for a house that was in the process of being built.  It was a small property developing he was doing business  with and it was headed up bu a German man. 

A few months later the German man was found murdered mafia style so here we were with a half a house built and £7000.00 out of pocket.  Now because I was only 15 at the time I can’t tell you the exact sequence of events after that but I can say that other people took over the project and continued building our house once my father paid the remainder.  However these other people didn’t see the conveyancing process all the way through and fled Spain once they had all their monies and finished the building.  So at no point did seller and buyer sit before a notary and sign an escritura.  The house is however all connected to utilities and we pay our SUMA so in that sense every has worked fine since 1986, but we had no escritura...abit like paying for a car and getting the keys but not the log book. 

In 1995 when my father died I attempted to resolve the situation of no escritura by putting the whole thing in the hands of the legal firm Miguel Angel Asociados, who I now believe seems to have an exclusive contract with Atlas.  Ie. Perhaps his practice might not have been the best one with the great benefit of hindsight.

The end result:  12 years later we do actually get the Escritura but the Land registry have turned around saying that the house can’t be registered.

The reason being is because ours is one of several terrace houses all built by the deceased German man on this particular plot of land, that’s the plot of land that’s registered and of course it’s bigger than the measurements of our house.  So the rest of the plot needs to be accounted for..and only way to do that is if all the neighbours come forward and do the same as us with regards getting their paperwork in order , and that’s something that will never happen.  In some cases the original owners have abandoned their properties.

We would be very grateful for any advice or suggestions

Thank you.

 

 

Thread: Serious problem with escritura and land registry

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