Common mistakes and how to avoid them

1. Signing the reservation before any checks

The classic. The viewing goes well, the agent mentions another interested couple, and a reservation contract with a €6,000 deposit is signed that afternoon — before a lawyer has seen the nota simple, before anyone has verified that the seller owns what they are selling or that the terrace was ever legalised. If the checks then turn something up, the refund depends entirely on wording the buyer never read closely.

The fix costs nothing: have your lawyer appointed before you start viewing seriously, and never sign a reservation they have not read. A serious seller does not walk away because you asked for twenty-four hours.

2. Treating the asking price as information

On much of this coast, asking prices are opening positions, not valuations. The spread between asking and closing varies by town, segment and how long the listing has sat — and the only way to know the difference is comparable sold data and time on market, which the selling side has no incentive to volunteer.

Buyers who arrive from markets where asking prices are tight routinely overpay here simply by negotiating politely off the wrong anchor. Before any offer, insist on seeing the case for the number — real comparables, not the portal listing next door that has also been optimistic for eight months.

3. Underestimating what ownership costs

The purchase budget gets attention; the ownership budget often gets none. Community fees in amenity-rich developments run to several hundred euros a month, special levies (derramas) for façade or lift works can arrive as four-figure one-offs, and the mandatory non-resident tax filing is unknown to most first-time foreign owners until the first letter arrives.

Before you offer: read the community's minutes and accounts for the last two years. They tell you about planned works, disputes, arrears in the building — the things the brochure does not mention.

4. Skipping the survey because the building is “new-ish”

Spain has no tradition of the full structural survey that British or Dutch buyers expect, and many purchases complete without any independent inspection at all. On newer builds that mostly works out; on older villas — especially anything self-built or extended — damp, electrics, septic systems and unpermitted structures are exactly the kind of problem that surfaces after the keys. An independent surveyor costs a few hundred euros; renegotiating a roof after completion costs considerably more.

5. Assuming what is built is what is registered

The pool, the extra bedroom over the garage, the enclosed terrace — on this coast, the gap between physical reality and the land registry is a genre of its own. Buying unregistered construction means inheriting the risk: difficulty financing and insuring it, and the same discount you should have received applied against you at resale. The nota simple, the cadastral record and your own eyes must describe the same property; where they differ, the difference is a negotiating point or a reason to walk.

6. Moving money badly

Two separate mistakes hide here. The first is using a high-street bank for the currency transfer and quietly losing one or two percent in the spread — on a €400,000 purchase, thousands of euros for nothing; a specialist currency provider with a forward contract can also fix your rate when the budget is set instead of the morning of completion. The second is sloppy documentation of the source of funds: Spanish banks apply anti-money-laundering checks seriously, and transfers without a clean paper trail stall completions. Assemble the documentation once, early, properly.

7. Buying the holiday, not the property

The most human mistake of all. A week of sun, a beautiful terrace, a second viewing over wine — and a purchase decision made by the holiday version of yourself. The February version, who deals with a north-facing living room, an urbanisation empty for the winter, or a town that closes in the low season, is the one who owns it.

The discipline: visit in the off-season if you possibly can, at minimum walk the area at night and in the morning, and write down — before viewing anything — what the property must do for you in five years, not this summer. Then hold every candidate against the list, not against the view.

The pattern behind all seven

Every one of these mistakes has the same shape: a decision made before its information arrived. The Spanish process is forgiving to buyers who sequence it properly — checks, then commitment; numbers, then negotiation; February, then the offer. Our whole job, on the buyer's side of the table, is enforcing that sequence when the sun and the selling side are both pushing the other way.