5-If you finally sign a purchase contract, be afraid, be very afraid

So you sign a contract. Now is when the real problems start!

So, after all, I gave up my dream apartment (previous post) and continued to look for alternatives. And as always; just wen I was about to give up the whole idea something turns up.
In the beginning of May I find a top floor apartment of about 70 m2. Fairly cheap, nice building, heart of La Latina in Madrid, and in desperate need of renovation. Perfect!

Well... you may believe I am completely nuts when you see what state the place was in when I looked at it (see the images to the right).

Having seen about 80 apartments since November I, however, knew what I was looking for and I had learnt what questions to ask.

- So, have the building passed the ITE (the housing control to see that roofs and other vital parts of the structure are in good health), I asked.
- Oh yes, just one or two years ago, said the real estate agent and looked me in the eye.

That a building has passed the ITE is vital for a buyer. If renovations of the building are pendant, the new owner of the flat will have to pay the costs for the renovation. As will all the others living or having commercial premises in the building.

This cost may, in some cases be enormous. A friend of mine had to pay about 30.000 euros for fixing structural problems in the building where she has her apartment.

Considering this, I was not abut to fall for any cheap tricks.
First I checked that the announced square meters were correct. It is very common that they add quite a few extra ones in the advertises for apartments here in Spain.  This is done by checking the local "Catastro" (could as well be called the local catastrophe, in my opinion).

In Madrid this is done by going to this web site:
http://www.catastro.meh.es. Just search on Google if you are buying in any other region.

After that I checked the most important part; Were there any pending and/or enforced renovations. Hence; had the bilding really passed the ITE?

As any other person in Spain I did this by using using the official website available. Also these ones are locally managed, so each region has their own. (in Madrid  use http://www-2.munimadrid.es/GITE_FICH/SGiteCons). Everything looked good there. No pending renovations and no enforeced constrcution work was to be done. Perfect. I was safe!

In fact, I was not! Later on it turned out that the only way to really know if something is wrong with the ITE is to go, in person, to the central office; Departamento de Inspección Técnica de Edificios, far, far away from the city center in Madrid (again, look this up if you are buying in any other region of Spain).

The place is a mess! Piles of papers from floor to ceiling everywhere. How anyone can find anything there is a complete mystery (you can see a bad image of one of the more organized areas o in the end of this post).

Question: When is Spain going to move into the 21th sentry and start using the wonderful tools digitization gives us?

Anyway, keep this in mind dear readers; You must go in person the local central office and there find out if you are buying tons of trouble instead of an apartment!

After I have bought the place it turns out that the building was exhausted by the authorities as early as 2010, and in June 2014 they had still not gotten around to make that information available on the tools people use. Most people in Spain does not even know that you actually can go the central office and get the information there, and I, a  stranger in this country needed to find this out by my self. However, that is another story to be told later on.

So, in the end I buy the apartment. Without knowing that I would have to pay more than 3200 euros for the renovation of the building and without knowing that I, almost one and a half year later, would still not be able to start the renovation of my new home.

The owners also signed the contract, of course. Stating that "they did not know of any pending issues or errors". A complete lie, as it obviously turned out, but that has not helped me at all. As previously stated in this blog, the legislation is strange in Spain, and the justice work painfully slow. More about this in later posts.

Well, maybe I should just be glad, that the apartment was not in the building of my friend. If the amounts would have come to the 30-thousand euros she had to pay, I would probably have slit my wrists...

Stay tuned for the next chapter! That will tell the wonderful story of what awaited me, first time I used my own keys to enjoy the feeling of being a property owner. :-(

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Here is the image from the Departamento de Inspección Técnica de Edificios. Look at the piles on the left side. However, this image does not make the place justice, but ti may be because the image was taken in the registry area where the paper are supposed to just pass by.