Habitation certificate

• Certificate of Habitation/License of Occupation/Occupation License (CH/LO): This document is obtained from the Town Hall when construction works are finished, in order to confirm that the property fulfills with the legal conditions of habitation. This document is also needed to connect water and electricity to the property and to make the changes of the water and electric contracts into your name.

I would ask why there is no certificate. Was there one that has now been lost or has the property never had one?
Ask your solicitor (hopefully NOT the one recommended by the estate agent) what will have to be done to obtain one.

From memory it cost us €500/600 to obtain the certificate when we bought our place as a repossession from the bank with no cert of habitation. We needed a surveyors report and subsequent inspection by the town hall before the certificate was issued. I think the biggest problem is if the house has been adapted in some way since construction. In the old days a lot of people did not bother about licences and simply added floors and basements etc if they felt like it and this could give rise to fines or other complications. There is also the problem if you need to resell at some point. It is supposed to be a requirement to show the certificate at the notary when the sale takes place but I do not know if this is strictly enforced.

Re utilities, Iberdrola did not bother about the certificate and issued a new contract in our name but Hidraqua would not give us a new contract until we produced the certificate. To get around this we simply changed the bank details on the existing contract. We did have to pay the accumulated arrears though. 

As far as I am aware is is the vendor who should supply the certificate. You could always insist it is made a condition of the sale. 

The seller MUST provide this document, the same applies to "Certificado de Eficiencia Energetica", "Boletin de Instalacion Electrica" (you need this for your electricity supplier). 

Be aware that, while you may have water now, this might not always be the case. If the contract holder, previous owner, decides to cancel the contract the water company will disconnect the supply and will not reconnect until you can supply the certificate. 

This might be unlikely, but it is a very real possibility and one that will be outwith your control and knowledge until it's probably too late to prevent it. 

You might be happy to live with this, I wouldn't. 

I agree completely with your comment but in the short term it is a way around the problem. We obtained the COH and changed the contract eventually. To be honest I do not think many people would actually bother cancelling the contract but it is a possibility. 

Property can be bought and sold without the HC, as we did. We have a rural property and we knew that our Ayuntamiento would issue it if we had a new EU approved septic tank installed which we did a few months later but we were able to change the name on the existing electricity contract with our local co-operative before we had the HC but that could be because the electric was never cut off. We were also able to start a new contract for water as the previous owner had an arrangement with a neighbour to take some of his supply and pay him in cash as we are not on mains. Neither asked for the HC.
However, there are thousands of properties (about 250,000) in the whole of Valencia without certificates and I expect the rules are different depending where the property is, which Ayuntamiento, which utility, which supplier, who you speak to and if they had a good night's sleep!

You can't really buy a property without knowing if you are going to get utilities so my advice would be to get your solicitor earning his pay.

Hi PaulEmma,

When the property was originally built and purchased, the owner should have been issued a Certificate of First Habitation.  This expires after 10 years and has to be renewed with a Certificate of Second Habitation.  These certificates also last 10 years.  As Cheryl has said, there are many properties in Spain without Habitation Certificates, but it's much less of a problem if the property had the first certificate which hasn't been renewed since - in fact, it's the sale of a property that usually prompts the owner to renew the HC.  A selling agent shouldn't market a property without one, and your own lawyer should insist on it being a condition of your purchase.  However, if there's a specific reason why the property wasn't issued its first certificate, e.g. it's an illegal build, you may not be able to get one - that doesn't prevent such properties being bought and sold, but it may make some things, such as connecting to utilities, more complex.  

Has the owner, selling agent, or your lawyer advised why there is no HC?  I know La Marina urbanisation quite well (my in-laws lived there for almost 20 years) and I'm struggling to think which type of property there would not have an HC - unless you're buying in La Marina village?

Kind regards,

Kim

Hi, we bought a bank repossession in September 2020 and our solicitor arranged an architect to do a habitation certificate for us.  Being a bank repossession, the electric and water meters were removed from the property and you need the habitation certicate to allow the meters to be re-instated.

I would suggest talking to your solicitor as they should get accounts set up for you with the utility companies as part of the conveyancing process.

We’re selling our property and needed a new habitation certificate & energy certificate. We used architect David Soriano Filiu, +34 629 442 103 ( Almoradi)

He was excellent and had the documentready the following day , charged 214 euros for both .