The Big Adventure: October 2012

I guess we counted on things being done a little faster than we should have, so when I announced that the eight days, for neighbours to respond, was up the letter had only just been sent. The eight days is now well and truly up, just a week and a bit until we exchange. We've just watched an episode of Grand Designs and a woman said something along the lines of 'It's better to have a small piece of preciousness than a large piece of mediocrity", out house is that small piece of preciousness, it is so special to us, and it will be ours. As we do not have Portuguese bank account yet I am transferring the money to our Real Estate agents tomorrow, I want to give it 12 days for the money to clear and the cheque to be drawn, I have small anxieties over little things that could go wrong. I want this so much, we've waited for so long (or so it feels), that I can't risk anything that might lose us this dream.

And so we find a house.

Please note this is our experience of house buying in Portugal other experiences may differ! It is worth noting that I have only given 'our' experience of purchasing a ready to move into property that the owner is desperate to sell. All of the ownership papers and other legal requirements were therefore all in place. If one was buying a ruin to rebuild or land to develop then much more running around and background checks would be essential and timescales could telescope. We know, we did some on the first property.

We have found the buying process in Portugal is relatively straightforward though you do have to get your head around all the different classifications of land and what you can and can’t do with it. We were extremely lucky in that we found a lovely independent real estate woman Kirsten, who put us onto to some great guys at Re Max (1000). They could not do enough for us they drove us around, bought us coffee, water even the odd snack. You have to be prepared to be patient, buying a house is quite a social thing in Portugal so just relax and go with the flow, a lot of the time it’s just too hot to do otherwise. We did approach ERA about one property but it was ludicrously over priced and discovered many others to be likewise.

Remember to do as much checking up as you can yourself, some of the areas these people work are huge and it is your responsibility to yourself to look around, if you see something even slightly suspicious ie a small industrial estate, look into it, Google translate can be a great friend. If you use a solicitor in the buying process then you will have to state what searches you want doing.

So when you finally find your property or your property finds you, you will be asked to pay a ‘goodwill’ deposit of around €500 in cash, this is returned to you whether you buy the property or not, they will then take some basic information, including a photocopy of your passport. You will then need do acquire a fiscal number, you will need this for all transactions from buying a house to buying a car or even a mobile phone, the cost is €10.10, Tom our real estate man got ours for us, despite having to queue for ages as it was the last day for the locals to pay there back car taxes from 2008.

If the property is fully registered and there are no objections from any party involved in the sale (as ours is) we were advised that using a solicitor of our own would basically be a waste of €800 to €1000 euros as we are already dealing with advocates and notaries. However if you aren’t going through one of the big, reputable real estate agents then I would advise you use one, plenty of them speak very good English which is good as we don’t know a lot of Portuguese yet.

The next stage was to visit Remax’s advocate who drew up the promissory contract. You will be asked for a deposit, 10% of the value of the property, this is lodged with your real estate company, once it is paid and the buyer has signed the promissory contract, the deposit is transferred to the buyer and both parties are bound to it. If you pull out then you will lose your deposit however if the buyer pulls out they have to pay you double the value of the deposit.

With in the contract will be a time scale for the transaction to be completed, make it realistic, ours is set at six weeks as we are cash buyers and have our flights booked though we can change the date up until the end of November without defaulting. If we don’t sign by the end of November we lose our deposit.

If you are buying a small rural property then the neighbouring property owners will be given an 8 day option from the signing of the promissory contract to buy the property at the price you negotiated. This odd little law is due to properties being split down over the years through equal division between family members and becoming so small they are of very little use for farming so they offer the chance for neighbours to extend their plots. We are assured that this never happens (about 4 days to go on ours).

Our next stage is to meet a notary to sign final contracts and transfer the property over to us. They vendor prefers a cheque from a Portuguese bank so as not to incur bank charges, our real estate people are happy to do this if the funds are transferred to them in good time. I’ll add more about this part of the process once we have completed.

Tom has given us a rough idea of our bills out there, are you sitting down? Council tax is around €70 (£56) per year, yup that’s correct per year! Electricity will be around €30 (£24) per month, we will be buying a solar hot water system and some solar panels to reduce or negate this. Water is from the irrigation canal and though is ok for bathing and cooking can not be drunk, so it will be bottled water until we find a suitable filtration system, the cost is around €90 (£72) a year. So lots of positives there.