Talk Quesada forum

The Spanish property market needs a vast overhaul and some professionalism integrity and honesty injected into it. It's unlikely to happen and in the meantime the market along with house prices are skewed and will remain so.

The point is no Buyer should be concerned with paying fees and any seller, agent or solicitor who asks for payment in any form other than is contributing to the above and their integrity should be questioned.

Tootandploot wrote:The Spanish property market needs a vast overhaul and some professionalism integrity and honesty injected into it. It's unlikely to happen and in the meantime the market along with house prices are skewed and will remain so.

The point is no Buyer should be concerned with paying fees and any seller, agent or solicitor who asks for payment in any form other than is contributing to the above and their integrity should be questioned.

Well said TootandPloot! If a vendor's estate agent or solicitor was asing me, as the purchaser, to write the cheques for their fees, my first thought would be that it's a tax dodge! And whilst I take Shiva's point that if the purchase price is acceptable and happens to have these fees factored into it, it's not a problem, I would still be wary of a paper trail that showed me paying the vendor's fees - I would be concerned about potential conflict of interest and whether, in a court of Law, this could be construed as me contracting their services, rather than the vendor. It comes back to a point I make ad nauseum - don't use an agent's solicitor, always make sure you use an independent, no matter how much easier or cheaper the agent tells you it will be.

I suspect a possible reason was the seller saved a few euros through avoiding bank draft charges, which didn't bother me or also as it all had to be paid together and all at once on the completion day at the notaries office, perhaps they were simply relying on the house sale money to afford the estate agent fees. Understand people's caution but don't see where there could be a tax dodge as all the paperwork was correct with house price stated correctly in the deeds and properly read out by the notary , and, for the record , I used a highly reputable independent solicitor ( again I agree that's important ). But there you go, different experiences.

When you think about it a very similar thing actually happens in the UK,only its all done electronically rather than at the notary. Buyer pays the money over,the seller only gets their share net of solicitor and estate agent fees. So if you look at it that way the buyer is paying the bills.

The more interesting question to me is why are estate agent fees ( agreed by the seller!) so apparently high in Spain? They clearly have to make a living and will incur costs in advertising, marketing, taking people to see houses paperwork etc but are these costs really much higher than in the UK? I think anywhere between 1 - 3% can be typical in UK, depending on the area market but here it seems to be ( as earlier poster said) typically 3 - 5%.

Any ideas?

I don’t think the Spanish Property market bears any resemblance to the UK market which is heavily regulated. Firstly, nowadays no market valuation would include fees of any sorts (unlike it has in the past). Secondly it would be highly unusual to share Properties the way the Agents do here. They seem to take the view that a share of something is better than a share of nothing but in my opinion this is where control is lost and integrity goes out of the window.

As for the fees, I don’t know the answer to that specific question of charges but I do know that there is absolutely no trust between the agents, Sellers and buyers but that applies to a lot of services in Spain. I suppose it stems from the way the tax system works and overheads etc. There is no compromise in either fees or willingness. I have learned this from experience. You cannot apply UK logic, which is a natural thing to do if that is all you have known to the Spanish system/process of buying or selling houses. There is a vast difference.

I dont know on UK, but in Spain if you want you can go directly to the owner and try to buy a propperty.

It is not fair that you contact a Real State, you visit a property and you go alone trying to buy to the owner. But you can look for properties that you would like and knok on the door, and speak directly to the owner to buy direcly for less price.

Most not all estate agents add ridiculous charges for their lack of services. Usually they ask how much you want, then add their chunk, any negotiated reductions are usually deducted from sellers price leaving comisssion intact

Should they be asking how much you want? Are they not the experts being paid to give you a value of your property? I would never tell an agent how much I wanted. Nor would I tell an agent whether or not I had a mortgage, what’s that got to do with how much my house is worth? It has been asked though!!!

Maybe the OP was concerned about adding the 10% to the purchase price when buying...

Maybe this will help
https://www.spanishpropertyinsight.com/ ... ain/costs/

When we sold a house In Alicante the commission we paid to the agent was 3%. This covered all the costs, such as putting the house on a website, in the papers, showing people around and doing all the paperwork... sounded okay to me.... we used our own solicitor and that was an additional cost of course..

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