Latest happenings!

Well, it certainly is a long long time since i wrote my original article about buying property in Catalunya or Aragon. In fact it was someone who read my blog and suggested that i should make frequent updates due to the number of horror stories of people building in Catalunya.

Quite recently there have been a number of cases in court around the Gandesa region in Catalunya, and it seems to be people from the UK and Holland who are either at fault/or misguided/or building illegally/or in fact being made examples of, depending on which way you want to look at things.

I know a family from Holland who bought a piece of land between El Pinell de Brai and Gandesa. They didn't want to do anything wrong or "ruffle any one's feathers" about building, so they applied through the proper channels to renovate the stone building which was already on the finca. Of course, we now all know that you can only ever get permission to build an almacen, which is basically a tractor and machinery storehouse (not a house for living in) but this has been the trend around this area for a long time now. There must be so many "almacens" with fitted kitchen's, bathrooms and walk in wardrobes, than in any other part of the world.

After all of the paperwork was completed, the building work started. The Dutch family were in Holland, while a local English builder started the work.

Not many days after the work had started, the builder was visited by the Forestal Agents (sort of Police for the countryside) and he was asked for the written permissions. He didn't have them, so he was told to stop the work immediately and they wrote out a very long and detailed report in Catalan, and told him to give it to the owner of the finca.

The owner mailed the permissions to the builder, who then showed them to the local council and Forestal agents, but apparently the authorities went to visit the construction site again, and they said that the renovation had gone 50cms past the agreed position, therefore all building would be suspended and the owner would hear the outcome. This seems an awfully trivial excuse for them to stop the building, but the general feeling now is that they will find fault with anything.

Now, let's take the story forward 7 months.

The owner arrived in the area, to discover that there was a warrant out for his arrest, and unless he went to court and appealed about his conviction, he could actually end up with a criminal record here in Spain, and the worse case scenario, he could go to prison!!!

This is when we actually met Mark, the owner from Holland. He was an acquaintance of some clients of ours from Holland, and they asked if we could do anything to help, because obviously they needed someone who could speak fluent Catalan or Spanish, to explain to the court what had actually happened.

After months and months of waiting for an appearance in court and 2 visits to Spain, just to fill in some paperwork, he is still no nearer to the eventual outcome.

Judging from other similar cases recently, he will be told to take down the building at his own cost and put the ground back in it's original condition, and also receive a fine, and obviously, never be allowed to live on his piece of Spanish soil, therefore rendering it useless to him.

Needless to say, he has now decided to buy a property just across the border into Aragon, where he can get permission to legally build a house to live in and not just a tractor shed.

Another case has been in court, where an English man bought a finca from a local estate agent in Gandesa who told him that they had permission to build a house there, so he took them on their word, and it just so happened that the estate agents husband was a builder..................what a fantastic coincidence, when of course it is so difficult to converse with local Spanish companies, if you don't speak the lingo!
Complacency nearly always sets in, and it is so easy to be sucked into the easy option.
This poor man took everything as being Gospel from the English estate agent and her husband, so he purchased the land, and he then handed over his hard earned money to have the house built.

Now, this particular finca is only a few hundred meters along the same road from the one i bought myself over 3 years ago. I already knew that you would never get permission to build in the area, as it is protected.

BUT, a lovely single storey, 3 bed roomed house was constructed, and the guy was almost ready to move over and live in his dream home, when the Forestal agents came and "slapped" an illegal build petition on the property, and court proceedings began in earnest.

The courts declared that he had to take down the house, so he subsequently decided to take the estate agent to court for lying about the whole situation.

The story so far is that it has cost him an awful lot of money to buy and build in the first place, more money to pay for legal representation in court, more money to pay another company to demolish the house and even more money to counter sue the estate agent. I don't suppose she is too worried about that, she already has her commission for selling the land, and also her husbands "cut" for building the house..............................and as we know here in Spain, nothing happens very quickly, so it could be years before the end outcome is achieved, and i don't suppose this has anything to do with the estate agent now having her own house on the market for sale and also her villa on the coast. She will probably have sold her own properties before this case gets to court, and if the local "gossip machine" is anything to go by, they intend going to Bulgaria, to start selling all of those lovely new cheap apartments which are springing up all over the place.....................................but "dodgy estate agents beware", we have heard that if you "do the dirty" over there, you are dealing mainly with local Mafia groups, and somehow i don't think they bother with the Judicial system!!! So you might just be biting off more than you can chew, but you know the saying...............what goes around comes around!

Now, on a much more happy and pleasant note, many of our own clients are at the planning stages of construction, and even starting to build on their fincas just a few kilometers away from these horror stories in Matarrana in Aragon. I am hoping to update on some of them very soon when i get the time.