Purchasing real estate inevitably means investing significantly large sums of money.
Spain has had its fair share of horror stories of people being cheated by unscrupulous fraudsters; and many have lost all their money in shady property deals.
Generally speaking however it has to be said in the majority of cases these unfortunate people had only themselves to blame.
To be fair to those who bought and didn't know the rules, in Spain there are a number of differing factors in the procedures involved in transferring real estate from one owner to another. In the UK for example, each property has its own deeds, which stay with the property forever. In Spain, this is not the case and each time the property changes hands a new document, called the escritura, is produced.
This escritura document is often accepted by those unfamiliar with the system, as being the same as the Deeds of a UK property.
But this is absolutely not the case!
- g. Mr X buys a villa; the public notary produces an escritura showing Mr X is the owner of the property.
Later Mr X sells his villa to Mr Y and the notary produces a new escritura showing Mr Y is now the owner of the Villa.
Now there are two escritura's one says Mr X is the owner and the other says Mr Y is the owner, clearly there is only one true owner and that is of course Mr Y.
However, if Mr X showed you his escritura and claimed he was the owner of the villa, you might well believe him, you don't know he already sold it, after all the escritura document states quite clearly that he is in fact the owner.
So why would you question it?
It's not difficult to imagine a scenario in which Mr X suggests, on producing his old escritura you buy his property. In the UK it is not usual to complete a sale through a public notary, so you might consider it quite acceptable to proceed with the deal and exchange contracts in a private office. Why should you question it, that's how it works at home!
The result is Mr X collects a bundle of cash for a property he did not own, takes a trip to South America and you lose all your money!
Recently Notaries have started to endorse old escrituras CANCELLED, when they issue a new one, but there are still a lot of escritura's in circulation which have not been c
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