Well, we’re getting ever closer to agreeing a sale with potential buyers. Annoyingly, our house paperwork wasn’t correct so that threw a small spanner in the works, however I think we’ve agreed a way forward.
This isn’t going to be as straightforward as a ‘normal’ sale. As we found out last year, the banks won’t lend a mortgage on old properties like ours. Well, they will, but at a very low amount which makes it impossible to sell to anyone who needs a mortgage. This is a common situation and there are various alternatives, one of which is taking a deferred payment, which is what we are doing. The exact mechanics still have to be agreed but it looks like this is how we will proceed – with an aim for us to be moving at the end of October!
The icons on the map above represent the houses we’ve been looking at (online).
One surprisingly good thing that comes from this is we will have to work to an extremely small budget. However, when earlier in the summer we thought we had a cash buyer (who couldn’t proceed because he couldn’t turn his Lamborghini in the barn – true!) we were almost disappointed that we didn’t have the budget restriction that we had last year (when we first realized the problem with mortgages) because it’s very easy to start looking at the top of your budget and ignore some of these interesting properties at the lower end.
A very distinct difference in the Spanish housing market and the UK and US housing market is there’s basically no ‘selling’ of the property. I guess this is different in the big cities, but here it’s certainly not unusual to see a house for sale with the photos the wrong way up or starting with a photo of an unexplained piece of wood or a photo of a foot… We saw one house whose lead photo was a bottle of handwash (a few years ago – before it became an essential – but even now it would be an odd photo to sell a house with!). And at the bottom end of the market it’s even worse – with sometimes a description as short as ‘house for sale’, and a few random photos.
These are examples of the lead photos on property websites – clearly not ‘selling’.
But we’ve now become a dab hand at researching properties. When Ian went to La Palma last year, apart from the steepness of the hills, there were no surprises with any of the properties he had visited because we’d been able to research them so well, and we hope that this is the case now as well.
One thing that’s of great use is the Catastro, which is an online map of properties and boundries. This is so useful as we can immediately see that the buildings that someone is selling are legal, whether they are designated as houses, storage, industrial, and we can see the land boundaries. This means we can immediately rule out houses that are ‘illegal’ or not classified as residential (‘might’ be possible to reclassify them, but not something we would undertake),
That is, of course, that we are able to find the property, as many don’t give addresses. But this is where Google Maps comes in. We are now extremely expert in finding properties with the smallest of descriptions or photos. I think we’ve probably found 95% of the properties we’ve been searching for.
And this is where things get interesting – as we find the property with two crappy photos and the description ‘house for sale’ is actually walking distance to a beach – or has the Atlantic ocean as it’s backdrop – or is near the Best Bench in the World (it does exist) – or is next to a motorway (it’s not all good things we find!).
So finding suitable houses in the low price band is more difficult – as it takes more work – but there are certainly some interesting houses here ready to be discovered. Hopefully we’ll have more news soon!
This is a great example. This house is the white house in the pic below. And the advert doesn’t even mention the ocean and the photo above is the best pic!!! While it doesn¡t have a sea view you certainly don’t have to walk far to see it, wouldn’t you include a photo like the one from Google Maps somewhere in the listing?
