Buying an unfinished house in Spain and finishing it yourself is not a bad idea in principle. The arithmetic can work in your favour: a plot that already has foundations, a concrete frame and drainage on it may cost you less than a bare plot in the same street plus the price of building all that. Sometimes it is simply the only thing available where you want to be. Before you commit, though, there are three questions worth answering.
For a project of this kind, having a team of architects in Málaga behind you makes a difference at every stage of the process.
Let’s take them one at a time.
What is the legal position of the property?
Unfinished houses are unfinished for a reason, and the reason is usually money. It is common to find the owner in insolvency proceedings (administración concursal), or the property carrying charges: a mortgage, an embargo, a debt secured against it. In Spain those charges stay with the property rather than with the seller, which is where overseas buyers tend to get caught out. Before you do anything else, have a Spanish property lawyer (abogado) pull the Land Registry extract (nota simple) and read the file properly, so that you do not take on somebody else’s problems along with the house.
What condition is the structure actually in?
Beyond the paperwork there is the building itself. These structures have spent years in the open, usually without the waterproofing that would have protected them: roofs left unfinished, external render missing, nothing painted. Reinforcement corrodes, slabs crack, blockwork takes on water. Some of that is cosmetic and some of it is not, and the difference is rarely visible from the road. Have a building surveyor (perito) go over the frame, the envelope, the roof and whatever services were installed, and put in writing what can be kept and what has to come down.
What is its planning status?
With the legal and structural questions dealt with, there is still the planning file. Work stops for planning reasons too: an enforcement case (expediente de restablecimiento de la legalidad urbanística), a neighbour’s complaint, or a plain mismatch between what was granted planning permission (licencia de obras) and what was actually built. The house may have gone up a storey higher than the licence allowed and taken a neighbour’s view with it. It may cover more square metres than the local planning rules permit. If so, your sums change. It is no longer the value of the land plus the value of what is already built. It is the value of the land, plus the value of what is legally built, plus the cost of demolishing the part that is not, and taking down a finished concrete frame is not cheap. Sometimes the answer is that the deal no longer stacks up, which is a useful thing to find out before you sign rather than after. An architect can read the planning file and tell you exactly where the property stands.
At our architecture practice in Málaga, led by Juan Goñi, we help you make the strategic decisions that keep the investment working.
In short: before buying an unfinished house, run three sets of checks — legal, structural and planning. One of two things then happens. Either something turns up that changes the price or kills the deal, and you have found it for the cost of a report rather than the cost of a house. Or the checks come back clean and the operation still interests you, in which case there is no reason not to take this route.
