Owning a house in Spain is a dream, buying a house in Spain is something totally different. Of course you know that the rules are different from your own country but that it is so different still comes as a a surprise. In Holland, where we come from, buying a house is relatively easy, the notary being the one who does all the paperwork, but in Spain it is mainly the estate agent who does all the work, i.e. if you have a good estate agent. Luckily for us, Mary Ryan proved to be a very good estate agent. Without her, buying our house in Spain would not have worked out so well, in the relatively short time we had planned for dealing with this.
In order to buy a house in Spain, you need to travel around and visit all the parties yourself (again a big difference from the way things are arranged in our country). You have to open up a Spanish bank account, apply for a Spanish identification number, find a notary, and take care of registering your property in the Spanish land register. An example of how time consuming this process can be is that the land register for your house is not situated in the same place where you have to register your land… Taking into account that procedures seem to change constantly, it took us up to 3 visits (and thus 3 two-hours drives) to receive our Spanish identification number.
Although we speak some Spanish, I don’t know how we could have found our way in the Spanish bureaucracy without Mary. She made appointments for us with all the officials and accompanied us to all the meetings, dealt with the paperwork and last but not least did the registration of the land and the house for us, because we had to leave for Holland.
We are very happy with her involvement. And she helped us again enormously by finding us a completely reliable, and very nice handyman, to help to refurbish our home. Her enthusiasm for Asturias made us even more happy with choosing to buy a house here in this beautiful part of Spain.
Ellen Bijsterbosch and Hendrik Jan Vis, Purmerend, The Netherlands
