In this actual example below the buyers completed on their Spanish purchase by paying the final purchase money to the vendor, under the instruction of their Lawyer. But they did not receive the Title Deeds (Escritura) in their name and signed by the Vendor. Is this Normal in Spain? Below is a letter descibing what has actually happened to a British buyer in Spain, followed by Puerta Vides general advice on what should happen.
Readerīs Question to Living Spain Magazine Spanish Lawyers
We very much enjoy your magazine and all the helpful and interesting features in it and should be most grateful if you could help us with a dilemma we have.
Some fourteen months ago we purchased an apartment in Costa Blanca. We are very happy with the apartment although it wasn't purchased without its problems and it is proving nigh on impossible to get the builder to rectify certain problems or to satisfactorily finish certain areas - as a result the community have decided to take the builders to court to get this work undertaken.
On a personal basis we now want to obtain the deeds to our property (we have no mortgage) and this is also proving very difficult. We have consulted our solicitor (who incidentally is the solicitor through whom we purchased the property and who we feel should have protected our rights to receive the deeds from the builder upon completion of the purchase - a matter which the solicitor denies is his responsibility!). The solicitor informed us that he has endeavoured to obtain the deeds of other properties in our community to no avail and has therefore advised us to take the builder to court in order to obtain our deeds. This solicitor has advised us that he has no reason to suspect that the builder is in financial difficulty but we are led to believe that should the builder go into liquidation we would be liable to pay the re-mortgaged amount that the builder has taken out. We are told that the builder has re-mortgaged our property for approximately three quarters of its worth in order for him to finance future building work - a practice which we are given to believe is quite normal in Spain!
Hopefully this problem will be a warning to others seeking to buy a property in Spain. Had we known, we would have had a small mortgage which would have meant that the builder was compelled to pass the deeds to the lender; we could have then paid off the mortgage and would have been given our deeds.
We understand that, if we take the builder to court, all expenses will be reimbursed but we can ill afford these costs in the first place and would welcome your advice as to the best way forward in this matter, in particular:
- Should our solicitor have secured the deeds of our property for us? (we did what Des Sparkes in your January/February issue warned against, ie used the solicitor suggested by the company through whom we brought the property.
- Do you have any idea of the cost of such court proceedings - we were not helped here by the solicitor?
- Would it be wise to change our solicitor and find an independent solicitor?
- Is this a common problem?
- Would we be best to just wait until the builder decides to send us the deeds in his own time (not at all sure about this option but perhaps this problem is more widespread and normal than we realise)?
- Would we really be liable to pay for our apartment again if the builder did go into liquidation having re-mortgaged our property?
We look forward to hearing from you - should you consider this worth printing we would appreciate our names not being printed at this stage.
