An old farmhouse among the orange groves. A pool, a view of the mountains, a lemon tree by the kitchen door, and Valencia city 35 minutes away. For plenty of buyers, a country house is the reason they started looking at this region in the first place. The photos show the pool. The risk is in the paperwork. Over the decades, many houses in the Valencian countryside were built, extended or...
Spanish banks lend to foreign buyers, but on different terms than at home. The biggest mistake is not the rate. It is asking the bank too late. Most international buyers start their search in Valencia the same way: they look at properties, find one they love, and then ask whether a Spanish bank will finance it. That order is the source of most of the financial stress I see in this market. Spanish...
When you view a property in Valencia, the agent showing you around appears to be doing you a favour. He is friendly. He answers your questions. He knows the building, the neighbourhood, the neighbours. What he does not tell you is how many different ways he is making money from the transaction you are about to enter. The problem is structural. And once you understand how the structure works, you...
A while ago I spoke with a Dutch buyer who had spent weeks reading everything he could find online about buying property in Spain. Forums, blog posts, horror stories: outstanding debts on properties, parts of a house that were never officially registered, buyers who found out too late. By the time he reached out to us, he was more anxious than when he’d started. He’d contacted three agents beforehand,...
Most buyers arrive expecting the process to feel foreign in every sense. Different language. Different legal system. A bureaucracy that seems designed to test your patience before you've even found a property. And there's some truth in that — buying in Spain as a non-Spanish buyer does involve extra steps that a Spanish national doesn't face. But the anxiety around those steps is almost always larger...
The first time I did a live video viewing for a client abroad, it was a disaster. The buyers were in the Netherlands, excited, slightly nervous, waiting on the other end of the line. I was standing inside a Spanish apartment — one of those older buildings with walls half a metre thick. The moment I started the call, the signal died. I moved rooms. It got worse. The image broke up, froze, broke up...