The Questions That Write Themselves Into Guides

There is a moment that happens in this business roughly once a day/week/fortnight. Someone on the team gets a question from a client, types half an answer, stops, and puts a message in the group chat asking whether we have anything written about it. After all why rewrite what we have already written. Sometimes we do. Most times in fact we do but nobody can remember where it is at the moment. Equally sometimes the honest answer is no, we have answered this question two hundred times by email and never once written it down properly for everyone to find.

Over the years that last category is where our guides came from. I didn’t sit down one day and decide to produce a whole library. Each guide exists because a question arrived so often that writing a proper answer became easier than repeating ourselves for another decade. They became blog posts we could point to. However those blog posts get lost over time as new ones are produced. A couple of weeks ago I finally put all of them in one place, and you can find the full reading list here.

But rather than just pointing you at a page of links here, I thought it would be more useful to show you some of the questions that caused the guides to exist in the first place, along with short versions of each answer. If the short version is enough, you have saved yourself some reading. If it is not, you know exactly which guide to open.

More than the asking price, and less than the horror stories suggest. Since June this year the transfer tax on resale property in Valencia went down to 9 percent, and then you add notary, registry, legal and agency fees and you should be budgeting around 14 to 15 percent on top of the purchase price. The people who get caught out are the ones who budgeted to the last euro of the asking price and then discovered the taxman exists too because not only do you pay this 9% tax but also you need to remember that the agency fee and the lawyer’s fee have VAT on them. The full breakdown, with worked examples, is in the purchasing costs article and calculator.

This is the question sellers ask last when maybe they should be asking it first. Between capital gains tax, the plusvalia, agency fees and, for non-residents, the 3 percent retention taken at the notary, the gap between your sale price and your bank balance can be surprising and maybe disappointing. The selling guide walks through every deduction, and our online estimator will do the sums for your specific numbers before you list, not after.

Our standard reply is that this question is backwards. It’s sort of a Homer Simpson “I dunno”. Tell us how you live first. Do you have children in school, do you work from home, do you need to be near the airport or would being near the airport be an absolute dealbreaker, can you survive August without a pool?

Once we know that and more then the shortlist of neighbourhoods/towns sort of writes itself. The area guides exist so you can do that first pass yourself including the bits estate agents usually or even always leave out.

You can do a lot remotely, including granting power of attorney so a purchase completes while you are still at home. What you can’t do remotely is know whether you actually like a place, which is why we will always tell you to visit before you commit, however good the video tour looks. There are exceptions to this of course. If you have already been here, know exactly what you want and the area you want to be in then a remote purchase is feasible. The buying process guide covers what can be done from a distance and what requires your feet to actually be on Spanish and, more importantly, Valencian soil.

A lot of people rent first but buying straight off the bat also makes sense for many people especially with the rental crisis ongoing. A much better option than being stuck in a maybe overpriced long term rental is a furnished rental and this can let you work out which neighbourhood suits your life rather than your holiday. Buyers who have done this almost always search with more confidence and fewer wrong turns. This is precisely why Stepping Stone Rentals exists, and the SSR Client Information Pack explains how the medium-term rentals work, what is included and what to expect as a tenant.

A confession to finish with. There is one question that arrives constantly and does not yet have a guide of its own because I haven’t got round to it: “The listing says needs updating. What is that actually going to cost me?” In Valencia property adverts, “needs updating” covers everything from a new kitchen to a building held together by little more than a vague sense of optimism and two crossed fingers behind the owner’s back. With Valencia Remodels managing renovation projects for our clients we have the answers. We just have not written them down properly yet. Consider that guide already on the list.

Which brings me to the invitation today. If you have a question about buying, selling, living or renovating in Valencia that none of the guides answer simply reply to this email and ask it. If enough people ask the same thing, it becomes the next guide, and you will have saved some future buyer and us a lot of searching. That is, after all, how every single one of the others got written.

The full reading list, every guide in one place, is here of course.