How we improved the property purchase experience

Buying here from abroad is coordination, not litigation

A Costa del Sol purchase almost never gets difficult because of a hard point of law. It gets difficult because five parties who do not talk to each other have to move together: the bank granting the mortgage, the agency that introduced the deal, the developer or seller, the notary who sets the date and the registry that records it.

The buyer, meanwhile, is in Oslo, London or Toronto. They do not know Spanish procedure, they have never heard of a nota simple, and their only real question is always the same: where are we, and what is still missing.

That question used to cost half a morning. Check the email, call the gestoría, find out whether the bank had replied. The answer came, but it came late and it came hedged.

The registry extract comes back with the charges on it

The registry check is the moment a purchase either falls over or goes ahead. An uncancelled mortgage, a seizure, a tax charge, an easement nobody mentioned.

The Land Registry search runs from the matter and the extract comes back to the matter, with the charges called out against the entry they belong to. Nobody downloads a PDF, renames it and drops it in a shared folder hoping to find it again on signing day.

When a charge shows up, it shows up inside the file where it matters, with a date and a source. That is what you then put in front of the client to explain why there is a delay.

Catastro, without leaving the matter

Surface area, cadastral reference, use, year of construction. Every transaction has to check them, and traditionally that means opening another window, searching by reference and copying what you find by hand.

The Catastro lookup returns those fields to the matter, already attached to the property. The gain is not lookup speed — that was always fast — it is that the result stays where the transaction lives instead of in the memory of whoever looked.

The notary is a date, not a chain of phone calls

Setting the signing is the classic bottleneck. It has to fit the notary's diary, the bank's availability for the banker's draft, the buyer's travel and, very often, a power of attorney granted abroad that has not come back apostilled yet.

With the date in the matter's calendar, everything that depends on it orders itself backwards: when the funds have to be in place, when to request the community certificate, when the power of attorney must be in Spain. The preceding deadlines stop being a mental list.

The client gets a date, not an estimate. And when that date moves — sometimes it does — everything hanging off it moves with it.