Welcome to Cloud Nine Spain’s official blog, your trusted resource for navigating the dynamic real estate landscape in Marbella, Southern Spain. Our seasoned professionals, Sean Woolley and Darren Simons, share valuable insights to guide you through the intricacies of the Spanish property market.
Darren Simons: “You know, we always assume, well, it’s obvious, but a lot of people might not either. Linda and Peter from Tunbridge Wells, very nice part of the world.”
Sean Woolley: “I don’t know it. Okay.”
Darren Simons: “Okay. I’ve said, now this might sound really obvious, but should I use a lawyer and how do I find one?”
Sean Woolley: “Okay, good question. In my opinion, yes, you should use a lawyer because they will help to protect you and safeguard the transaction. That may sound obvious, but for instance, I’m a lawyer by training.
If I were going to buy a property in London tomorrow, I would definitely use a London-based lawyer because they will know all the intricacies and the people they need to contact to make sure that my purchase is safe and secure.
So when you are buying in a foreign country, particularly a foreign country that has a different system of justice, which it does in Spain, it’s a notarial system of justice. So it’s very different to the UK and other countries, other Northern European countries. So yeah, my advice is to use a lawyer and the lawyer’s work is normally split into two main chunks.
The first chunk is when you reserve the property and you want reassurance that the property you’re buying is legal, it’s legally registered, that it has all its licences in place so that the lawyer at that stage, if there is a problem, can immediately flag it up and you won’t lose your deposit. So that’s the first sort of half of their work.
The second half of their work is when we get to completion and they will prepare, in conjunction with the seller’s lawyer, they will prepare firstly, the contract, but also then at completion, the title deeds are prepared for the notary.
And at that stage, before we get there, we can check that what you’ve agreed to buy is in fact what’s registered and what you’re going to get on the day of completion at the notary.
So there’s quite a bit of work involved. My advice is to choose a lawyer that’s locally based who understands the differences between the different town halls, the different legal issues that may exist in different town halls.
So if you’re buying in Malaga, I wouldn’t use a lawyer from Madrid because I think all that lawyer in Madrid is going to do is sub it out to someone in Malaga. So it might be a wasted exercise and also a waste of some of the money. But yeah, a lawyer for sure is an important part of the process.”
Darren Simons: “And also, it’s always nice when we have clients come over that we can at Cloud Nine help them with the whole journey, can’t we? So with all of that, it’s not just, well, there’s your house, go off and go and find a lawyer. We can help.”
Sean Woolley: “Exactly. Now, a lot of clients, if they’ve got friends and family who’ve bought here before, they might already have a lawyer that’s recommended to them. That’s fantastic. But if not, a lot of people are kind left floundering if it’s the first time they’re buying here.
They do ask us for recommendations and we have sort of four or five firms of lawyers that we generally use and recommend to our clients. And it’s so that we can keep tabs on and we’re like your sort of project manager for the purchase.
So if you’re struggling to get a response from your lawyer, we can give them a knock and say, “Come on, you know, get back to our clients, please and inform them of this, that, and the other.” So yeah, we normally have four or five that we keep on their toes to make sure that they do a great job for the clients.”
Darren Simons: “Great stuff. Linda and Peter from Tunbridge Wells, thank you for your question. More coming up very soon. Keep watching.”