our journey to Spain

When we got interested in the Spanish Costa Tropical, we decided to look for a house to buy or rent in the area.

But how to find the right home when you live about 4000 km away from your place of interest? We relied on a good Spanish friend’s advice who recommended us to search in Idealista.com. Idealista.com covers Spain, Italy and Portugal, but we have not checked if in the other two countries it is as good as in the Spanish version.

Later we would find also other sites dedicated to real estate, and that are very popular among Facebook groups dedicated to searching house or just among expats in Spain. These other groups are fotocasa.es and pisos.com.

These three are the ones we check very often. They all work as search engines and their usability is excellent.

How they work.

We noticed that Fotocasa and Idealista have other languages than Spanish. Idealista can also translate into Finnish by selecting the language.

Pisos.com and Fotocasa.es change the language automatically with the support of google translate.

The home page is where you need to select if you want to buy (comprar), rent (alquilar) o also you can get other options. In this moment, idealista.com can make you select compartir (share), while pisos.com offers you the option obra nueva (new building). Fotocasa.es is slightly different. It presents you a vertical menu from where you can select several options. If you look for a house and you use Spanish language for any reasons, you leave the default option that should be vivienda (place where to live), and next to it, in the same bar, you have all the other options: comprar, alquilar, obra nueva, compartir. Once you have selected your options, enter the name of the place you are interested in.

The three websites will show you the area on a map. The results come quickly and localize the buildings of the diverse prices on the map with a certain degree of accuracy.

It is possible to list the results and apply filters to tailor your research according to your needs/taste/possibilities. You can rank them according to price, relevance, number of rooms, number of toilets, type of building, and so on.

You can save your favorites, and you can organize and save your research (busqueda) in lists.

Depending on what we are looking for, we decide which one to use, but I think that this choice is based on our personal taste only. I like the my lists tool offered by fotocasa.es. I organized my research per village. This way I know exactly what to find and where. On the other hand, I find idealista.com good for administrative information, laws about housing, and the possibility to use Finnish language.

Consider visiting before you get too involved with a house.

Searching for the place that is going to become your new home in a new country is very exciting. However, there are many things to consider. One of the most interesting facts is that today we can have an apparently easy life by searching and looking at places that are on the other side of the planet just using tools such as google maps, views, etc. However, one still cannot get the concrete idea of the shape of a land.

Ari and I, both have seen the mountains during our lives, but never lived in a place within mountains. Watching at those 3D maps, we were wondering, among other things, what could be the distances among villages travelling on the real road!? How winding or tight the roads could be? In other words, Google can give us a lot, but not the real experience of life.

What we did was a very concrete and analogical step: we flew to Costa Tropical in February 2022. In person.

Between December and January, we selected the houses we liked most and, of course, suitable to our pockets. After this, we contacted the real estate agencies that took care of selling those houses.

All in all, our experience was positive. That’s why we recommend to take time and invest in a trip to explore the area. This is not only important for the choice of your new home. For us it was good to see how Costa Tropical looks like in winter.

Find a local professional real estate agent to keep as reference point

Find someone that can be your reference point. Try to get local professional support because you need someone who can tell you the good and the bad of the place and, importantly, can give you support in selecting the houses. Finding a place to buy is not easy when you do not know the area. You need a patient person who can support you and also give advice about the house you like. You are not from there, you don’t really know enough until you move and live the area for a while.

You also need to rely on someone who knows which documents you need and can provide the documents relative to the building and the area (if needed), about the supplies of water, electricity, and so forth, who has access to the official registry (catastro) about the houses.

One of the real estate agents we met was Eduardo from the real estate agency Agicastell. Agicastell – whose website is available in several languages – is a local company operating mainly in the area of Castell de Ferro and Gualchos but, according to our knowledge, able to support people searching properties to buy all over the comarca.

We asked Eduardo about a house, and he showed us three beautiful houses inline with our budget, optimizing the time of our staying. He explained to us about the disposition of the houses, so that we could understand how much light and sunshine we could get from each place. He also told us a bit about the villages. He actually set those properties in the environment. This is not possible to be found online.

Agicastell attended our requests during almost one year and that’s why we think we can recommend Eduardo as a referent person, in the area.

The social media sources for info on houses

Finally, we find very useful to follow social media groups focusing on matters relative to moving to Spain, and in particular Andalusia and Costa Tropical. Basically we follow Facebook groups. We are learning a lot about he areas, habits, prices for buying/renting. An important issue in this sense: it is obvious that speaking Spanish allows you to get more involved and gives a better understanding of local situation. What is remarkable is the difference of prices Spanish are used to and what the real estate market is becoming because of the important request from foreigners. We recommend to try to find out the local prices without starting a negotiation based on prices suitable our country of origin. If you pay a higher price than the standard, it does not have a good impact on the economy.

For example: if you want to rent an apartment, for one week, do not just drop a maximum price you have in your mind. Make a little research also using touristic renting pages (Booking.com, Airbnb, etc.) and try to figure out the most reasonable price for your holiday. Maybe you’ll save some money for a cool dinner by the moonlight 😉

Good to know! Something you won’t find anywhere else.

Differently than in Finland, where the seller can be only one by law, in Spain, even if the house is offered on the market by real estate agencies, in the same period, also the owner can try to sell it privately. For this reason, you will see the same house in diverse pictures, under different perspectives. And for the same reason we try to see if to see diverse pictures are available in the three sites.

We did not know also that in Spain it is allowed to let more than one agency try to sell the same house! For this reason, we found strange, in the first moment, seeing a house having different price according to the seller or the web site.

Another interesting piece of information: in Spain it is more common than in Finland but probably as common as in Italy, the rent to buy option. This option was thought to avoid the heavy interests that credit institutions ask for. The rent to buy (alquiler con opción a compra) is well explained in idealista.com.

Warning!

Beware we recommend you to think carefully before buying. We have decided to rent first and then chose the place after six months to one year. Our choice depends on the fact that we want to be as sure as possible of our business. Like in all the web based experiences there can be traps and cheaters. Not all what you find in the real estate websites exists!

What else? In some areas, especially rural ones, some houses have been built without any permission and they need to be legalized. You should also verify the situation in the register (catastro o registro de propiedad). Be careful about the utilities: water and waste water utilities, and make sure that the house is not off grid (unless you look for that).

The Spanish laws about living as well as for other issues, are organized according to the region (Comunidad Autónoma), and this means that what is true for Andalusia might be different for Catalonia, Galicia, Extremadura, and so on.

A practical recommendation is to hire an architect that works independently and a lawyer. We think that the best would be to involve someone who does not work with the real estate agency you are buying from. This might allow an objective judgement of the building.

Again, what we can do is to recommend you to be as careful as possible, especially when it comes to buy a property. We have chosen some real estate agencies as our reference points only after we met them in person and verified their credentials.

We hope the information contained in this post can be useful, and we suggest you to get your own information too, as we are not lawyers or specialists in Spanish real estate…. But now we just wanted to share our experience with you again 🙂

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