Posted: Wed Jul 8, 2020 9:40am
Agree with above, most agents are useless. The vast majority blatantly lie to you, many... MANY... of the houses they market on their sites are not actually for sale, even more they've never actually seen or had contact with the owners, they've just "syndicated" (fancy talk for copied) houses from other agents sites and added them to their own.
If you think some of the practices in the UK give agents a bad name, wait til to deal with the ones in Spain!
Less than 10% of them will respond to emails; my instinct is as soon as they sniff you are not in the locale and so able to "view tomorrow", they lose interest, fast.
I am going to get flack for this I suspect, but many are corrupt little toe-rags who will literally tell you anything to get a sale moving. And I'm not playing the Johnny-Foreigner card here, the many ex-pats who setup shop in Spain as agents are just as bad, if not worse. Bet advice is once you nail down an area hook up with the local agents, you'll soon suss out the good from the bad. We've got a small handful of agents we trust to the point we'd almost buy on their word. Almost ;-) But it's taken sifting through a lot of shit to get to these guys.
A really good tip (I think) is to hunt the agents who have the properties you like on social media. If they are active it's generally a good sign.
We're now at the end of a three-year journey, which started two years prior. In those three years we've visited Spain 4/5 times a year to research areas. As Jasmin would say, to "stand on the land". On one trip we racked up over 1000kms in a week driving around exploring.
Our pattern was research online, find areas (villages/town) we liked, spend a LOT of time on Google Streetview wandering around. Then if we liked the look of things fly over and spend a week or so there. We have fallen in love with so many places, then fallen out of love with it once we get there. But that's the point of research.
We've now settled on two villages where we plan to buy once the prices bottom, or get close to it. Ironically, we've not actually stayed in these villages, but we know them well as they are close to areas we've visited a lot.
The point I'm trying to make is you will not find the perfect place over-night. Well, you might, but it's unlikely. It's more than likely going to take a lot of trips and an enormous amount of research.
As Movingon said. It's likely the place you fall for will be nothing like the place you have in your mind at the start of the process. And that's what it is; a process.