The Off-Plan Buying Guide

The reservation. A short document and a payment, typically €6,000 to €20,000, or around 1% of the price on the larger launches. It holds the home for an agreed period, usually thirty to forty-five days, so your lawyer can read the file before you are committed. Whether it is refundable is defined in the document: read that clause first.

The checks. A recent nota simple showing clean title and any charges over the land; the building licence, granted and matching the technical project; the bank or insurer issuing your guarantees; and a payment schedule tied to certifiable milestones. Those four decide whether what follows is administrative or anxious.

The private purchase contract. The promoter’s standard instrument, signed on the strength of those checks. It fixes the price, attaches the plans and the specification, sets the instalment timetable and defines the delivery window. Standard does not mean immovable: the schedule, the delivery margin and the treatment of parking and storage are negotiable, and the guarantee wording deserves reading line by line.

Construction. The build moves through certified phases: foundations, structure, enclosure, installations, finishes. Your instalments attach to those, and progress should reach you as reports and photographs, not reassurance.

Choices, and their cut-off dates. Most schemes allow a defined set of changes, each closing on a date set by the programme. Upgrades that improve comfort, efficiency or durability hold value; decorative ones rarely move a resale figure.

Completion and snagging. Once the works are certified finished the town hall issues the licence of first occupation. You sign at the notary, pay the balance, the deed goes to the land registry, and you receive keys, manuals, warranties and meter readings. A professional inspection then produces a room-by-room list for the promoter to remedy inside agreed windows, a normal and finite phase with the statutory warranties behind it.

The rule in force is the first additional provision of the Building Act, Ley 38/1999, as rewritten by Ley 20/2015 and applying to every contract from 1 January 2016. It replaced the 1968 regime and is stricter in every direction that matters.

Every advance payment is guaranteed. From the moment the building licence is granted, the promoter must secure the return of all sums received in advance, including the IVA charged on them, by an individual insurance policy or bank guarantee issued in your name, carrying statutory interest from the date you paid until delivery was due. The obligation sits on the promoter. The instrument is yours to call.

The money sits apart. Advance payments must go into a dedicated account, separate from the promoter’s other funds and applied only to that development’s works. Ask which institution and which account before the first transfer.

The licence is the gate. No licence of first occupation means no water, no electricity, no mortgage drawdown and no lawful handover. The town hall grants it on the final works certificate and technical file, and it is the one condition worth watching in the last months of a build.

The specification is contractual. The memoria de calidades attached to your contract lists the materials and installations promised. Anything below it is a contractual question, not a matter of taste, which is why it matters more than the show flat.

You are entitled to look. Ask for a site visit at structure stage and again before completion, and your own surveyor for the pre-handover inspection. A promoter reluctant to allow it has told you something useful.

If the programme moves. Delay is the common friction, not failure. Document the cause, obtain a revised programme in writing, and confirm that the guarantees covering money already paid extend to the new date.

And afterwards. The same Act gives you one year on finishes, three years on installations and habitability and ten years on structural safety, with insurance the promoter must carry behind the ten-year cover. Those periods run from certified completion of the works, not from the day you take the keys, which matters if you buy the last unit in a phase delivered earlier.

Amendments. Most schemes allow a defined set of changes, priced by the promoter and closed on a date set by the programme. Ask for the list and the deadline at contract stage rather than discovering them at month fourteen. Structural changes, and anything touching the licensed project, are usually refused.

Assignment before completion. Selling on the contract rather than the finished home is permitted on some schemes and prohibited on many; where it is allowed the promoter sets the conditions and a fee. If that flexibility matters, establish the position in writing before the private contract. An assignment carries its own tax treatment, a conversation for your lawyer and not a sales office.

Letting. The rules differ by municipality and, inside a scheme, by the community by-laws that take effect at handover. Short-term holiday letting in Andalucía needs registration and a tourist licence, and a community may restrict it. Long lets are simpler and lightly regulated. Decide which you intend before completion, because the answer changes the furnishing budget and the shape of the first season.

Exit. A new build sells well when its paperwork is whole. Keep the contract, the plan set, the specification, every guarantee with its matching receipt, the licence of first occupation, the deed, the warranties and the manuals in one place. Buyers and their lawyers move faster on a complete file, and so do lenders asked to refinance.

Judging the promoter. Track record beats brochure. Look for schemes delivered in the last cycle, delivery measured against the window originally promised, guarantees issued promptly rather than after chasing, payment schedules tied to certifiable milestones, and communication that continues when a programme slips. Those are quiet signals, and they predict the experience far better than any image of a building nobody has built. Ask which schemes the same team delivered, then go and look at one lived in for three years. Nothing in a brochure survives that visit, and nothing replaces it.