How to Check a Spanish Property for Hidden Charges and Debts

In Spain it is perfectly legal to sell a house that has debts on it. Nobody has to clean a property up before putting it on the market. The seller can advertise it, show it to you on a Tuesday afternoon and let you sign, with a mortgage still registered against it and two years of unpaid community fees in the administrator's file.

My name is Daniel Bertomeu and I work alongside my father Juan Bertomeu, a lawyer with offices in Moraira and Dénia, here on the Costa Blanca, since 1991. We are independent lawyers and tax advisors, which means we act for the buyer. Not for the agent, not for the seller, and not for whoever drafted the contract you have been handed.

The buyer is the only person in the room with an interest in finding those debts before the deed is signed. So this is what we look for, and where we tell a client to stop.

Can a Spanish property really be sold with debts on it?

Yes, and that is the whole problem. Spain gives buyers strong legal protection, but it is the buyer who has to switch those protections on. Nothing happens automatically because you turned up with a deposit.

There are two categories and people mix them constantly. Debts of the seller, which stay with him after you sign. And debts that attach to the property itself, which become your problem the moment the deed is signed, regardless of who ran them up.

That second category is small, but it is the expensive one. Unpaid community fees and unpaid council property tax both sit in it. The man who stopped paying is on a flight home and the town hall is looking at the house, not at him.

What can actually be attached to a property here?

A charge is anything registered or claimable against the property rather than against a person, and we see the same list every year.

• A mortgage, the obvious one and usually the easiest to deal with.
• An embargo, a seizure noted against the property by a creditor of the seller. Sometimes that creditor is a court. Just as often here it is a tax authority such as SUMA or the AEAT, which enforces through its own administrative procedure with no judge involved at all.
• A usufruct, where somebody who is not the owner has the legal right to use the property, quite often an elderly relative.
• A tenancy already running. Whether it passes to you depends on the kind of lease, when it was signed and whether it was registered, so it gets checked rather than assumed.
• Unpaid community fees.
• Unpaid council tax, the IBI.
• Easements, servidumbres, meaning rights of way, drainage runs and access rights neighbours hold over the land.

And then the court annotations: a lawsuit noted against the property, a prohibition on selling, a resolutory condition from an earlier sale where the price was never fully paid, an option to purchase registered in somebody else's favour. Those are a different species. Not a negotiation, a stop sign.

What does a nota simple tell you, and what does it not?

The nota simple is the extract from the Land Registry and the first document we ask for. It tells you who the registered owner actually is, how the property is described, and what charges are registered against it. It is cheap, it is fast, and no purchase should move a single euro before somebody has read one.

Now, the part that costs foreign buyers real money. A nota simple saying the property is free of charges does not mean the property is free of debts. Unpaid community fees do not appear in the Land Registry. Unpaid IBI does not appear. Unpaid water and electricity do not appear. A tenancy that was never registered does not appear either, and most tenancies on this coast never are.

So "libre de cargas" is a statement about the register, not about the house. A seller can hand it to you in perfect good faith while four thousand euros of somebody else's debt waits quietly for you.

There is also something that limits the property without reading like a charge at all. On this coast a plot can fall inside the coastal protection zone of the Coastal Act, which restricts what may be done with the land. That is a limit on use, not on ownership: inside the protection zone you are still the full owner and you still register your title. What settles it is the official coastal boundary, the deslinde, rather than how many metres you are from the water, so where it matters we check the deslinde alongside the nota simple.

One more thing about reading it. We read the whole document, not just the charges section, because old easements are very often buried in the descriptive text of the plot rather than listed as a charge. The neighbour's right to drive across your driveway sits in the paragraph most people skim.

Which documents do we ask for, and in what order?

The order matters, because each document tells you what to ask for next. This is the sequence we run and it has not changed in years.

1. A current nota simple.
2. The community of owners certificate, stating exactly what is owed on that apartment. It is signed by the community secretary with the president's approval, and in practice it is usually the administrator who issues it.
3. The IBI receipts for the last few years, plus a debt certificate from the body that actually collects the tax. On most of this coast that is not the town hall but SUMA, the collection agency of the Alicante provincial council, which handles the IBI of every municipality in the province except Alicante city, Elx and Xàbia.
4. The most recent utility bills.
5. If there is a mortgage, a payoff certificate from the bank with the exact outstanding balance.
6. A physical visit to see who is actually inside the property.
7. The clauses that go into the deposit contract.
8. And last, a fresh nota simple on the day of the signing, before we go to the notary.

If you want to work through it yourself first, we built a property purchase checklist you can run through in about five minutes. Same order we use internally, written for a buyer rather than a lawyer. The wider process, from NIE to Land Registry, is in our guide to buying property in Spain as a non-resident.

Which debts actually follow the house?

Two of them attach to the bricks rather than to the seller, and neither appears in the Land Registry as a charge, which is exactly why they catch people. A third, the municipal land value tax, reaches the buyer by a different route and has its own section further down. What can show up in the register is the consequence rather than the debt: a seizure annotated once enforcement has started, or a tax charge note left behind by an earlier transfer.

The first is community fees. In every file we treat unpaid fees as money the community can pursue from the apartment itself, not only from the owner who ran them up. How far back that reaches is set by statute and has been widened over time, so we check the current text on the file in front of us rather than quoting a figure from memory. The practical point is simpler than the arithmetic: some of the previous owner's arrears can land on your apartment.

The second is IBI, the annual council property tax. When the property is transferred it stands as security for the unpaid instalments, as a subsidiary liability attached to the property rather than an automatic bill in your name, and notaries have to warn the buyer about it. The town hall also has a preferential claim, without anything being registered anywhere, for the current year and the one immediately before it.

Let me put a number on it. Take a flat in Dénia, where the urban rate is 1.05 percent, so a cadastral value of around 105,000 euros produces a bill of roughly 1,100 euros a year. The seller has paid neither last year nor the year before, which is 2,200 euros of unpaid instalments, and it is the property that answers for them. Once a bill goes into enforcement the surcharges climb in bands of 5, 10 and 20 percent, so the debt being chased from the seller can reach about 2,640 euros plus interest. That is what gets retained at the notary, on a debt the nota simple never mentioned. The current year may not be in that state yet, because the voluntary payment window runs on the collection agency's own calendar.

Which is why we never waive the community certificate, not even when the seller is a bank. A buyer can be asked to release the seller from producing it, and accepting that release is precisely how people end up paying somebody else's debt.

What happens if somebody is living in it?

You check with your feet, not with paperwork. A tenancy that was never registered will not show up in any search, and whether the buyer steps into it depends on the kind of lease, when it was signed and whether it was registered. That question has a real answer in each case, and it gets answered before the signing rather than after.

So we visit, and we prefer to visit close to the signing date rather than three months before. Handing over the keys has to mean you can walk in on day one with nobody in your way. A tenant in place is not automatically a deal breaker, but it changes what you are buying and it gets priced and written down.

What goes into the deposit contract when there is a charge?

One rule covers every economic charge on the list, from a mortgage to back IBI. Either it is cancelled before the signing, with a document proving it, or the money is retained from the price at the notary and paid over on the spot. Never "the seller will settle it afterwards". A seller who wants the sale accepts a retention, because he is getting the rest of the price the same afternoon.

The IBI of the year you buy is a separate question from arrears, and it belongs in the same contract. Ownership on 1 January decides who owes the whole year to the town hall, and the Supreme Court has held that the seller may pass the proportional share on to the buyer unless the two of you agree otherwise. It is a default rule rather than a fixed one, so we write down which of you carries it instead of discovering it at the notary.

All of it goes in writing into the deposit contract, with a clause that lets you walk if the promised cancellation never arrives. That contract does far more work than most buyers realise, which is why the difference between a reservation and an arras contract is worth understanding before you sign either one.

Charges are also a negotiating position, not only a fright. An easement that limits what you can build, or a tenant who is staying, either comes off the price or the signing gets conditioned. The judicial category is different. A lawsuit annotation, a prohibition on selling, a resolutory condition, a registered option in favour of a third party: there we stop, and we do not restart until the release is in our hands.

Why do we pull a second nota simple on the day of the signing?

Because the register keeps moving after you reserve. An embargo or a lawsuit annotation can be entered between the day you paid your deposit and the day you sign the deed, and the nota simple from six weeks ago will tell you nothing about it.

The notary obtains his own up to date registry information before authorising the deed. Ask him what it showed. It is the last moment at which the answer is still useful, and it is cheaper to delay a signing than to unwind a purchase.

One tax point, because the buyer carries it

One piece of Spanish local tax law surprises almost every foreign buyer. The municipal land value tax on a sale is normally the seller's bill, but when the seller is a non-resident individual the law makes the buyer the substitute taxpayer. If it goes unpaid the town hall comes to you, and the seller is already back in his own country.

That is the typical Moraira, Dénia and Jávea transaction, a non-resident selling to a non-resident. The answer is to retain the amount at the notary, and it is separate from and additional to the 3 percent you withhold when you buy from a non-resident. That 3 percent, with its rates, deadlines and forms, is Modelo 210 territory and lives on easy210spain.com.

The land value tax itself is set town by town, and so is the answer to which body issues the debt certificate and how long it takes to arrive. The local rates and the local procedure for Moraira, Dénia and Jávea.

The red flags that make us slow a purchase down

If a seller is rushing you and will not hand over the paperwork, that is the alarm. A serious seller expects you to check everything.

Then: a price noticeably better than everything comparable, a seller who refuses to request the community certificate, a missing year in the IBI receipts, a nota simple from weeks ago presented as current, and "there are no debts" said out loud and never written down.

None of those on its own means the purchase is bad. All of them mean the checking gets done properly before, not after.

This is exactly what an independent lawyer is for

Reading a register entry, chasing an administrator for a certificate and holding money back at the notary is not glamorous work. It is also the difference between owning a house and owning a house plus somebody else's arrears.

The agent is paid by the seller. The notary checks the deed is correct and is neutral by design, which is not the same as being on your side. You want somebody whose only job is you. That is our conveyancing service, from 1,600 euros plus VAT, in person at our Moraira and Dénia offices or entirely remotely with a power of attorney.

A quick legal note before you go

One last thing, and Juan makes me say it, because this is a law firm and a law firm has to say it. This article is general information, current as of July 2026. It is not legal advice on your particular purchase, and reading it does not make you our client.

Every property has its own history. A different town hall, a different community of owners, one charge nobody mentioned, and the answers here move. So before you pay a deposit, get your own file checked.