We’ve bought a house, part 2

A follow-up to my post on the hunt for a house and signing a contract. Read part 1 here: We’ve bought a house, maybe.

This is the entryway to our new house, which we have the keys to, legally, and we can come and go from any time we like, as long as we remember to bring the keys.

Our villa is through those doors at the back, in what used to be the garden of this 1861 palace. This first part of the building is three storeys and has been converted into four apartments, two each on the first and second floors. As is usual with these Moorish-inspired palaces (which used to house just a single family), the ground floor is mostly for looks and for occasionally hanging out. For us, this part of the building serves as a classy buffer between our place and Calle Porvera, one of Jerez’s hippest thoroughfares.

Calle Porvera. OK, it’s not bustling now but that’s because it’s siesta time.

For you Americans, 43 degrees C is 109 F. Sure, it’s hot – but we were in the middle of a heatwave. The occasionally sky-high temps are the reason the palaces are designed the way they are. The open central courtyard acts as a natural air conduit, funnelling hot air up and out of the building. It works. Combine it with a water feature on the ground level and you’ve got rather an efficient natural air conditioning system.

Anyway, back to the task at hand: how to buy a house part 2.

Our meeting at the notarío’s office was scheduled for 11am, so Jess and I, our wonder-architect Marta, agents Pedro and Juan, and the two former owners Pedro and Carmen all filed in to the tiny waiting room a few minutes before 11. Bang on 1.15pm our notarío José was ready for us.

Spending time in a small room full of Spaniards is something I’ve written about before but is worth describing again. Jess summed it up best when she said that, unlike Australian kids, Spanish children are clearly never encouraged to occasionally sit down and be quiet, a trait that apparently persists into adulthood. They speak about everything and nothing, usually at the same time, at a volume more commensurate with a crowd at a football final than with a small office space. It’s what makes the Spanish so gregarious, and friendly, and passionate, and colourful.

And if you’re from a culture in which your parents routinely told you to sit down and shut up when you’re in a waiting room, it’s a lot to deal with.

For two hours I tried and failed to practise my mindfulness exercises. Jess went for a few strolls outside the building. They say that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, but I now believe I’ve found something that penal authorities might be interested in as an alternative.

But I digress. A mere 136 minutes after our appointed meeting time we all filed in to the boardroom and proceedings began.

Before signing the contract you need to have a certificate de eficiencia energética de edificios, the energy certificate for your house. This is a document with a validity period of 10 years that the local government puts together for you. It provides an estimate of the efficiency in kilowatt hours per square metre per year based on floor area, heating and cooling type. Its purpose is simply to document precisely what kind of building you’re dealing with so everyone knows what’s what. We were chuffed that ours came in at a D rating, which according to Marta is very high for this neck of the woods. Most houses in Jerez are E or F on the seemingly arbitrary scale. José had solicited our certificate for us already.

In total there are 17 pages of energy efficiency data but this is the important bit.

If you’ve read part 1 of my house-buying guide you’ll recall that the €15,000 deposit we paid months ago went directly to the owners, not into some kind of impartial holding account like it would in Australia. This had us a tad concerned at the time but with Marta assuring us that it was perfectly normal and that Spanish people just trust one another we were okay with it. For paying the large balance, of course, a simple direct transfer wouldn’t cut the mustard, so the minute we found out the precise figure of the outstanding amount (literally the day before our meeting so really cutting it close) we rushed to our bank and left about 45 minutes later just as the bank was closing with four bank cheques, each costing €60:

• One for the owners’ bank, to pay out the balance of their mortgage

• One each for owners Pedro and Carmen (half of the balance of the purchase price for each of them)

• One for about €850, the notaría’s fee for switching all the utilities and other bureaucratic bits and pieces on our behalf (many do this themselves but we simply couldn’t be arsed taking the risk of cocking it up). Yes, we could have insisted on paying this relatively small amount electronically, but a) it was hinted that for some reason a bank cheque is preferred, and b) in the end the cost for this one was only €10, so fffft.

We were also asked to bring €107.16 in cash to reimburse the share of the IBI (council tax) that the owners had paid upfront.

And of course, Andalucía being the place it is, another €3811 to cover the second half of the agent’s fees (I’ve explained this in my earlier post). I did that by direct transfer before we left the building and emailed the receipt to the agent.

I’ll jump briefly to the end of the day here. We signed the final contract, grabbed the keys, waited five minutes for someone to print out a copy of the deed for us (the original will arrive by post), and went to a bar and got hammered.

And if this had been the whole story I would have been prepared to excuse the two-hour wait.

I haven’t yet mentioned the phone call we got from Marta at 8am that morning. She had just received a call from Pedro the agent, who dropped a figurative dog turd in our literal laps. In their wisdom, it seemed that Pedro the owner and Carmen had committed to buying their new place (I’m still not sure what’s going on there – we had thought them separated, which would explain the need for two cheques), and their payment deadline was in three days’ time. It meant that there was a chance that our bank cheque would not clear in time and their deal would fall through. So they asked if we wouldn’t mind cancelling the cheques and making an instant payment through the bank instead. They were aware that an instant transfer of a large sum can attract a fee of around €250 (x 2) but to them it was worth it. We would be reimbursed.

So I put on my pants, ran straight to our bank and queued for 30 minutes, then found myself in front of Mamen, the lovely woman at the bank who speaks English. I explained the situation and told her that we had been asked to make an instant payment – the cost be damned. But Mamen sensibly pointed out that doing so was risky for us as if something went wrong between now and the signing (she used a car crash as an example but personally I think that in Jerez you’re much more likely to be hit by a horse) then our money would be in someone else’s pocket and we’d have no recourse to get it back. She said that she would advise any of her clients not to do this.

So, at least I tried. Marta gave the bad news to Pedro the owner via Pedro the agent and everyone decided to stick to Plan A and hope for the best.

Following this, the meeting described above took place.

But then during proceedings it became apparent that there was a problem with the bank that held the owners’ mortgage. Recently that organisation had changed ownership, which meant that part of the mortgage balance ‘belonged’ to the old entity, the rest to the new. You wouldn’t think that would cause much of a problem but it did – something about the details of the payout needing to be changed, with a letter to prove it. Pedro the owner and Pedro the agent disappeared from the room for an hour, reappearing every 10 minutes or so to speak rapidly about something, grab a piece of paper and vanish again. In the scheme of things it was only another hour and not really anything that affected us, so tough titty. Finally everything seemed to be in order.

I would like to point out that throughout this three-and-a-half-hour experience no one offered us a drink.

Then, of course, once everything had been signed the spectre of the instant transfer reappeared. Surely now there was no reason we couldn’t do an instant transfer?

As it turned out, our bank branch – CaixaBank – is in the same building as the notarío’s offices, so we obligingly said that yes, we’ll go downstairs and see what could be done. I queued for 30 minutes, and found myself in front of Mamen, the lovely woman at the bank who speaks English. (The staff there know me quite well now, but I still wasn’t offered a drink.)

She informed me that although we had all presumed the cost of these instant transfers was around €250 each, on checking she found that it was more like €1100 each. She patiently waited while I called Marta, who set in motion another dynamic exchange with everyone in the boardroom (I was actually glad to be in the nice quiet bank for this) and they eventually decided that this was much too expensive.

What about a conventional transfer, one that would arrive within 24 hours?

Ironically, this was seen as risky for Pedro the owner and Carmen, because what if I got struck by a horse this afternoon and Jess decided to cancel the transfer and occupy the house anyway? Queue the evil laughter.

But after this eventful gathering they apparently decided that they could trust us, and the bog-standard transfer was made free of charge. As a gesture of gratitude, Pedro the owner and Carmen waived the €107.16 IBI reimbursement by way of making up for the cost of the now unnecessary original two bank cheques. They even spent a good five minutes trying to rustle up the €12.84 difference, but we ultimately forgave them that debt.

Lastly, we were handed an account for the 7% property tax (about €17,500) and the notaríos fee for doing the transfer (€360). This latter figure plus the €850 for extra services seemed quite reasonable to us, especially when you can get a beer next door for €1.50.

This meeting should have taken 20 or 30 minutes, but here we were four and half hours later (not including the hour I’d pointlessly spent at the bank that morning) in the aforementioned pub getting hammered.

But at least the house was ours. The renovating team starts in two days. What could go wrong?