Book Review: How to Move Safely to Spain
Vanessa Rocchetta finds this informative guide relevant and useful - even after eight years in Spain.
Spain is not a paradise and living here is far from problem-free’ but if you keep your head screwed on and are careful every step along the way you can end up with your dream house.How to Move Safely to Spain by Nick Snelling is an up-to-date, in-depth and comprehensive book about avoiding many of the pitfalls.
Snelling worked as a litigation executive before founding and running a UK construction company. Having worked as a management consultant for two Spanish estate agencies, he knows what the game is in Spain.
Buying property in Spain
Snelling focuses half of the book on the important decisions of what property to buy and where.
When we moved to Spain eight years ago we were told that location was the most important factor. And just as Snelling recommends in his book, we live five minutes away from a small village, 15 minutes away from a large Spanish town and an English estate. We are also 15 minutes from the beach and 25 minutes from Alicante airport (not under the flight path). The good location has made our life here comfortable and we also expect it will be easier to sell our property in the future.
Spanish property market: apartments for sale on the coast
Another important factor that we discovered is differentiating a holiday home with one for permanent living. Not a tenth of our possessions would fit inside the storage spaces of a holiday home and most estates are built as such.It’s crucial to know that your dream home is legal and the author recommends using bilingual solicitors who are experienced and covered by indemnity insurance. This is a fairly tall order although the author provides the website of one such firm in his book.
While we too used a bilingual solicitor eight years ago, our solicitor omitted to inform us that our property was in a green area where modification was unlikely to be approved.
Similarly, Snelling recommends using structural engineers and gives us a contact details for such a firm. This can prove to be extremely useful as our friends and ourselves included had no luck in finding one when we needed it.
In addition the author gives us a useful website for the Land Registry where you can find information about properties. I have used this and am delighted to confirm that we are indeed the owners of our land.
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