Building a house from scratch is a simple idea and a long process. If you have built before in the UK or Ireland, the design stage will feel familiar. The paperwork will not. In Spain the town hall, the architect and the Land Registry each hold a piece of the process. A house that skips one of them is difficult to sell years later. Here are nine things to get right when you build a house from scratch on the Costa del Sol, in roughly the order they tend to bite, from Klic Arquitectos; architects in Marbella and Málaga.
9 steps for building a house from scratch in Spain
1. Write a brief before you draw a plan
Decide what the house has to do before you decide what it looks like. How many bedrooms, over how many storeys, how you will live in it in August and how you will live in it in January. What you are prepared to spend, and what you are not. One page is enough. That page is what an architect designs against, and it is what stops the project drifting. Changes made on paper are free. Changes made once the working drawings are issued cost money. Changes made once the concrete is poured cost a good deal more.
2. Sort out the planning permission first
In Spain the town hall grants a licencia de obras — planning permission and building control rolled into one consent. You apply with a proyecto básico (outline design and compliance report) signed by an architect and put through the local Colegio de Arquitectos. That step is the visado. Since 2010 it has only been compulsory in certain cases, but several town halls still ask for it, or for the college’s certificate of professional registration.
Before any of that, check what the local plan (PGOU) allows on the plot: buildable floor area, setbacks, height, plot occupancy. A plot advertised as “buildable” is not always buildable to the size you have in mind. Its price only makes sense once you know how many square metres you can put on it. Budget for the municipal side too. The construction tax (ICIO) is capped by law at 4% of the budgeted build cost, each town hall sets its own rate up to that ceiling, and the licence fee sits on top.
3. Design it with an architect, and understand what the architect is there for
In Spain this is not a matter of taste. A new home cannot be legally built, signed off or registered without a project signed by an architect. That architect then stays on the job as dirección de obra until the final certificate. A good one earns the fee twice over: optimising the layout, controlling the specification, and keeping the design inside the regulations rather than arguing with them afterwards. Choose someone you can disagree with comfortably.
On higher-value plots the stakes are simply larger. Finishes, how the house sits in its surroundings and its energy performance are what the valuation ends up resting on. That is the work we do as luxury home architects in Marbella, and it is the difference between a house that works and a house that merely looks the part.
4. Build a budget that includes the parts nobody mentions
The build cost is the headline. The rest is what catches people out: architect’s and technical architect’s fees, geotechnical and topographical surveys, the licence fee and ICIO, connections for water, electricity and drainage, the ten-year structural insurance (seguro decenal), VAT — normally 10% on the build contract for a new home rather than 21% — and a contingency.
Two of those deserve a footnote. The seguro decenal is compulsory when a house is built to be sold. If you are building it for yourself you are exempt, but you will have to take it out, or have the buyer expressly waive it in the deed, if you sell within ten years. And the contingency is not optional: we allow 15% for the unforeseen in our own cost models, and on a new build we would not go below 10%. For an order of magnitude on the professional side, our own fee for the full commission on a new detached house under 200 m² runs €35,000–€45,000. If the contingency is the line you delete to make the numbers work, the numbers do not work.
5. Assemble a team, not just a builder
A house needs a main contractor, a structural engineer and a services engineer. It also needs a technical architect (aparejador — in practice the quantity surveyor and site inspector, whose sign-off is compulsory) and a health and safety coordinator, which is a legal requirement as soon as more than one company works on site. Check each of them properly: liability insurance, registration, and clean certificates from the tax office and social security. Then ask the contractor for the last three houses they finished and ring the owners. Twenty minutes on the phone is the cheapest due diligence you will ever do.
6. Spend on the things you cannot change later
Structure, envelope, insulation, waterproofing, windows and the routing of services are permanent decisions. Kitchens, tiles and taps are not. You can change those in fifteen years for a fraction of what it costs to open up a wall. On the coast there is a second filter: salt air and ultraviolet light punish external joinery, ironmongery and coatings far faster than they do inland. Spanish building regulations (the Código Técnico de la Edificación, or CTE) set the minimum standard for insulation, acoustics and fire. The minimum is a floor, not a target.
7. Run the job against a real programme
Ask for a detailed construction programme with the critical path marked, not a page of optimistic bar charts. Then add the administrative timelines to it: the licence, the utility connections, the sign-offs. Those are the ones that slip, and they slip quietly while nobody is watching. Agree in advance who chases the town hall, who reports to you and how often. A weekly one-page report beats a monthly meeting.
8. Inspect the work as it happens
Site inspections are not a formality. Somebody independent of the contractor should measure what has actually been built before each monthly valuation is paid, and write it down. It is not unusual for an early valuation to bill for work that is not yet on site. Money paid ahead of the work is money you have lost your leverage over. Catching a problem while the trades are still there costs a phone call. Catching it after handover costs a claim.
9. Do not stop at the keys
The house is not finished when the builder leaves. You need the final works certificate (certificado final de obra) signed by the architect and the technical architect, the first occupation licence (licencia de primera ocupación) from the town hall, the energy performance certificate, and the new-build declaration (declaración de obra nueva) registered at the Land Registry. Then the house exists on paper as well as on the plot. Until those are in place the property is hard to mortgage and harder to sell. It is a common reason a perfectly good Costa del Sol house sits on the market: the building is finished, the file is not.
In short, building a house from scratch is a planning exercise before it is a construction one. Check the plot before you buy it. Get the licence right. Budget for the whole cost rather than the build cost. Vet the team properly, and finish the paperwork with the same discipline you gave the foundations. Do those five things and the rest is detail.
We work in Málaga and along the coast on houses, refurbishments and hotel projects. Klic Arquitectos has been going as a practice since 2011, and our founding partners have been signing projects here for more than twenty years, from hotel work for TYPSA to the Puente Romano estate in Marbella. We are used to explaining the Spanish process to buyers meeting it for the first time. If you are weighing up a plot or a build, a short feasibility report before you commit is a sensible first step. Ours run €600–€1,400, depending on the plot and on what the town hall holds on it. It is what we would want in your position.
We also work on other building types: blocks of flats, single-family houses, retail architecture and hotels.
