Posted: Sun Dec 9, 2018 11:34pm
Some great advice above already. You shouldn’t as a buyer pay estate agents anything but you will need good professional help during the process especially to carry out thorough searches on any property you decide on to ensure all planning etc is in order, to check on whether a mortgage is owed on the property and ensure that there are no bills you might be stuck with afterwards.
We bought in summer having independently made a list first of 14 properties on the internet. It helped we’d being visiting the area for many years and only shortlisted properties that we could view where they were situated on the web.
We too used Abaco Advisors but visited them first in the Spring for a long and free meeting where all options and what was required of us were discussed. They are not the cheapest but we have family who had already been dealing with them successfully for years. Their offices appear a one-stop shop for everything from taxes to buying a property. We saw mainly Spanish staff in their offices but all spoke good English. In any event anyway we dealt with a gentleman there who is from the UK called Liam Banks who was very good and patient.
We flew back out a few weeks later and through him did the necessary NIE work, met Notary etc all in one day.
We returned in the summer after a lot of homework on the PC we met with 6 agents in 3 days and viewed the 14 properties. We found it much better to use different agents because even though we had a strict idea of what type of property we liked, some agents tried to steer us to some of their other properties even though they did not fit our criteria at all. A couple of them also suggested we use their solicitors to speed things up a bit.
Having your own transport and being independent is a good idea.
The house we settled on had recently been renovated and extended and while planning had been granted Abaco picked up on a couple of things that needed sorting out. All was done and a contract put in place where money was retained by Abaco to cover bills that needed paying.
We met some good estate agents during our 3 day visit and I’m sure there are also many more good solicitors and advisors around Torrevieja. The main thing is do not be afraid to ask plenty of questions and don’t be rushed into anything.