There was this hillside in the south-east corner of Spain where properties were just starting to be built. This was the view from the showhouse. "Three to six months", they said, and just like so many other people, we fell for it.
I'm not sure when work actually started on Marquesa VII, but this is the first picture I have. It took them six months to scratch a hole in the ground for the foundations.
The property is almost ready to handover (at least that's what the agent said in the letter). We had been promised that the villa would be ready by Christmas 1999, but, to be on the safe side, we had booked flights for Easter 2000. Nothing seemed to be happening so we flew out in the March for a progress check ... hmm, not quite ready to move in yet!
Eventually we moved in during the summer of 2000. The countless number of delays accompanied by empty promises left a bad taste at the time, but in the end it was definitely worth the wait. It's just a great place to be.
‘Patience is a virtue’ as the saying goes, and one thing you need when you are waiting for your villa to be built is an awful lot of patience. This was our first overseas property so we decided to use one of the larger property agencies on the Costa Blanca as a comfort factor. They speak your language and you feel a little safer and less at risk. However, we found they were pretty ineffective when it came to negotiating with the builder to ensure that they kept to schedule, and ‘three to six months’ ended up being closer to twenty.
All-in-all you are at the mercy of the builder, and he will willingly give you back your deposit should you decide to complain. Several months will have passed by, in which time the selling price of your villa will have increased, so he will be quite happy to sell your property to someone else for an even bigger profit!
Were we to buy another new property, we would not use an agency, and would only use a builder with a proven track record and a personal recommendation. One thing we have learned from our ‘buying a property in Spain’ experience is that things will only happen in their own time and you can't do very much about it.
‘Maņana’ means ‘at some unspecified time in the future, but definitely not today!’
