Selling Property in Spain: the Legal Side (Costa Blanca 2026)

A sale in Spain does not start at the notary. It starts the day somebody asks you for a document you do not have.

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 that when we act on a sale we act for the seller. Not for the agency that listed the house, not for the buyer, and not for whoever drafted the template contract. My father Juan is the lawyer of the family, ICALI number 4643. My job is the tax and the digital side.

This page is about the legal side of selling. The paperwork, the debts that travel with the bricks, what the notary really checks, what happens if part of the house was built without a licence, and how you sell from another country without getting on a plane. The tax side lives on its own page and I will link it when we get there, because trying to explain both at once is how people end up remembering neither.

What does a seller in Spain actually need before the house goes on the market?

Eight documents, and the last one only if you have a mortgage. Your title deed. A recent nota simple from the Land Registry. The last IBI receipt from the town hall. A certificate from the community of owners saying you are up to date. An energy performance certificate. The occupation title for the property. The most recent utility bills. And, if there is a mortgage on it, a certificate from the bank with the exact outstanding balance.

None of those are difficult. The problem is that two of them depend on somebody else's diary. The community debt certificate has to be issued by the administrator, and the energy certificate needs a technician to visit the house. Those two get ordered last, arrive last, and hold up the signing while everybody waits.

So order them early. A serious buyer's lawyer asks for the whole folder within days of agreeing a price, and the seller who has them ready is a different proposition from the seller who says he will look for them.

If you want the whole list in one place, we built a checklist you can run through in about five minutes at our seller checklist. It asks what we would ask on a first call, and it tells you which of your answers is going to become a problem.

What does the notary actually do before letting you sign?

More than most people think, and less than most people hope. He identifies the parties and checks they have capacity to sell, records the means of payment, checks the Registry electronically, and if something does not add up he does not authorise the deed. That last part is real. We have seen signings stopped at the table.

What he does not do is protect your interests, or the buyer's. He is neutral by design. So the buyer brings his own lawyer, and that lawyer pulls a fresh nota simple on the morning of the signing rather than trusting the one from six weeks earlier.

Which is why the file matters more than the appointment. The signing is the visible part. The part that decides whether it happens is the file built in the weeks before it, and that file is yours to build.

Which debts follow the house, and which follow you?

Some of them follow the house, and that is the whole reason the buyer's lawyer is so interested in your paperwork. Certain debts attach to the property itself, so the buyer inherits a problem he did not create, and he knows it.

Unpaid IBI is the clearest case. The local property tax is owed by whoever owns the property on the 1st of January, and the property itself is subsidiarily answerable for outstanding amounts when it changes hands, which means the tax office can turn to the house once it has gone after the person who owed the bill. On top of that the tax authority has a preference for collection over the current year and the immediately preceding one, without registering anything and against anybody. An unpaid IBI bill is a risk sitting on the house, not just an argument between you and the town hall.

Community fees work in the same direction. The flat answers for arrears within a period the law limits, which is why the certificate from the administrator exists and why no buyer's lawyer accepts a verbal "there is nothing outstanding". Whatever the precise window is in your case, the answer is the same. Get the certificate, and if there is a debt on it, clear it at the signing.

The mortgage is a decision you take at the beginning, not at the end. Either the bank sends a representative to the notary to cancel it on the spot against payment out of the price, or the buyer takes it over with the lender's consent. And then there are the charges that look dead but are only uncancelled, like an old embargo or a resolutory condition from a deferred price that was paid off years ago. Deal with those before the buyer's lawyer finds them.

There is one rule underneath all of this. Any money charge is either cancelled before the signing with a document proving it, or held back from the price at the notary and paid there and then. Never "the seller will sort it out afterwards". Afterwards is when people stop answering the phone.

Is anybody living in it, and does that stop the sale?

It does not stop the sale, but it changes it, and it is the one problem you cannot fix on the day. If there is a tenant, the first thing we read is the lease, because a tenant's right of first refusal can be waived in the contract and very often is. Where it was not waived, that tenant is told about the sale before it happens, and we keep proof that he was told. A tenant who was never notified can come back afterwards, and the person who loses the house is the buyer, not you. Which is why the buyer's lawyer asks about it first and asks about it twice.

The other half is occupancy in fact. Registry entries do not show who is inside a property, so that check is done with your feet, close to the signing date. Handing over the keys has to mean the buyer can walk in on day one with nobody in his way. If it does not, that goes in the contract, with a date and a consequence.

What is the second occupation declaration, and why does the certificate in your drawer not count?

It is the document that decides whether the buyer can put the water and the electricity in his own name, and no, the one you were given years ago does not travel with the house. In the Comunitat Valenciana the title for the second and later occupation of a home is not a licence and not a habitability certificate in the old sense. It is a declaración responsable, a responsible declaration, and it entitles you to occupy the property from the day it is filed.

It also does not expire on a calendar, and this is where almost everybody gets it wrong. Once ten years have passed since the first occupation, it has to be renewed when something happens: a new transmission of the property, which is exactly what your sale is, or the need to sign a new water, gas or electricity contract. Switching your electricity company to a cheaper one is expressly not one of those events.

And the paper the seller keeps in a drawer, the old cédula de habitabilidad or occupation licence, is treated as expired when the occupancy changes. That is the point of it. Do not show it to the buyer as if it settles the question, because his lawyer knows it does not.

One practical detail. Utility companies are not being awkward when they ask for the occupation title. They are legally required to demand it before contracting with a final user, which is why a buyer with no title ends up with a house and no water contract. In our own files we also time the technician's certificate against the expected completion date rather than ordering it the week the buyer appears.

One warning before you apply this to your own house. Since 1 January 2024 a town hall can no longer demand an express occupation licence as a general rule. What still changes the answer is the class of land the house sits on, because urban land and non urbanizable land are not treated the same, and half the villas in the campo sit on the second one. That is town by town territory, and we keep it on the local sites, for Dénia, Moraira and Jávea.

What happens if part of the house was built without a licence?

You have to split it into two questions that the market constantly mixes up. First, can the work be legalised. Second, is there an open file at the town hall. They are independent, and the second one is what actually blocks a sale.

Here is why, and I give it to you as what we check rather than as a rule I am going to quote at you. Before we let anybody sign, we ask the town hall whether there is a planning file open on that property. A buyer who is counting on filing the occupation declaration after completion, with a file already running against the house, is buying something he may not be able to connect, and that is a conversation to have before the deposit, not after.

The same applies where a declaration is already in and the town hall has asked for defects to be corrected. Until they are corrected, treat the paperwork as unfinished, because the town hall is entitled to act on it and the problem stops being a private conversation with your buyer.

And prescription is not legalisation. The administration running out of time to act does not make the work legal. Two different planes, and the buyer's surveyor asks about both.

If the property is on rustic land, one specific warning about a term you may run into. If somebody has mentioned an AFO for your house, that is Andalusian planning law and the term does not exist in Valencian planning legislation. What applies here is minimización del impacto territorial, and it can legalise the building and the residential use, but only for buildings completely finished before the 20th of August 2014. If yours was finished after that date, that route does not open, no matter how much time has passed. Even inside the date the town hall plenary decides, and protected or flood prone land brings a binding report that can end the matter, which affects a lot of the Marina Alta.

How long does a seller stay responsible after the sale?

Longer than most sellers expect for anything you knew about and did not mention, and shorter than most buyers expect for defects they could have seen for themselves. A seller answers for hidden defects that make the property unfit for the use it was sold for, and the buyer's window to complain is short and runs from delivery.

I am deliberately not giving you a number of months, because the length of that window and the day it starts running is exactly what decides whether a claim exists at all, and that gets answered on the facts of a file, not on a web page. What I can give you is the practical rule.

Write it down. Damp in the back bedroom, a pool pump on its last legs, a boundary wall a metre inside the registered line. Say it in writing before the signing and let the price reflect it. Disclosure before completion is the cheapest insurance a seller can buy, and silence is the most expensive thing he can sell.

Can you sell if the property came to you through an inheritance?

Yes, but not until the inheritance itself is sorted out, and that is a process with its own clock. To get the property registered in the heirs' names the Land Registry needs a public document, and the tax the death triggers has to be dealt with along the way. In practice no buyer's lawyer and no lender will complete against a title still standing in the name of a person who died, so the inheritance goes first and the sale goes second.

The parts that catch families out are the practical ones. Every heir has to concur, so the brother who lives in Canada signs too, and if he cannot travel he grants a power of attorney that says what it needs to say. The estate paperwork takes weeks in the best case, and there are filing deadlines that run from the date of death, not from the day the family gets around to it.

So if you have inherited a property here and you already know you want to sell it, bring both files to the same desk. The decisions you take when you accept the inheritance affect what happens when you sell it.

Who pays what, and the line that catches non-resident sellers

There is a default allocation of the deed costs and there is what the Spanish market actually signs, and the two are not the same. The allocation can be agreed, so agree it in writing in the deposit contract instead of discovering the disagreement when everybody is already sitting at the notary's desk. How those deposit contracts work is a subject of its own, and we covered it in reservation and arras contracts.

The IBI of the year you sell is the same kind of question. Whoever owns the property on the 1st of January owes the whole year to the town hall, and the Supreme Court confirmed in 2016 that the seller may pass on the proportional part unless the contract says otherwise. Notice the last four words. It is a default your contract can switch off, so put in writing who pays what, and from which date.

Then the line that surprises almost every non-resident seller. The plusvalía municipal, the council tax on the increase in the land value, is normally the seller's bill. But when the seller is a non-resident individual, the law makes the buyer the substitute taxpayer, so the town hall goes and asks the buyer for it. That does not apply where the non-resident seller is a company, only an individual. It is why the buyer's lawyer wants an amount held back at the notary to cover it, and why a seller who was never told about it thinks he is being robbed.

So there can be two separate retentions at the same signing. One is the withholding the buyer pays to the tax office in your name. The other, if it is agreed, covers the plusvalía and goes to the town hall, calculated on the land value and not on the price. Two retentions, two authorities, one signing. The figures and the deadlines for the first one are on the tax page, and you want to understand them before you are looking at a completion statement.

The taxes, in three sentences

The buyer must hold back 3 percent of the agreed price and pay it to the tax office in your name through Modelo 211, as an advance against your tax on the gain. You then settle the gain, and reclaim any excess withheld, through a Modelo 210, and the window is not four flat months from the deed: it is three months that only start once one month has passed from the transmission. The rates, the deadlines and how the gain is calculated all live on the tax side of the house, in the guide to the tax when a non-resident sells.

Can you sell without flying to Spain?

Yes, by power of attorney, and most of our selling clients do exactly that. You can grant it before a Spanish notary, or before a notary in your own country with an apostille attached, and then your lawyer signs the deed, deals with the registry and handles the bank on the day.

What decides whether it works is not the paper, it is the wording. A power drafted to administer a property does not authorise anybody to sell it, and that gets discovered on the morning of the signing, with a buyer, a bank and a notary in the room. Send the draft to the person who is going to use it, before you sign it.

Do not let distance stop you, but do not leave it to the last week either. Apostilles take days that nobody budgets for.

What we check before a client of ours signs

We build the file first and negotiate second. Title deed and nota simple, community certificate, IBI history, utilities, the energy performance certificate, the mortgage balance from the bank, the occupation title, and a straight conversation about anything built, extended or covered over since the deed was written. Then the charges get dealt with the way I described earlier. Then the contract says who pays what, and when the keys change hands.

We do this from Moraira and Dénia, for owners who are mostly not in Spain. The shape of the service is set out on our page about selling a property in Spain. And if you are on the other side of the table this time, the same process from the buyer's chair is in our guide to buying property in Spain as a non-resident.

On fees, so you are not guessing. Conveyancing is from 1,600 euros plus VAT, which is the base for properties up to 500,000 euros, with 0.2 percent on anything above that. The Modelo 210 on a sale is from 450 euros plus VAT. An initial consultation, if all you want is an honest answer about whether your file has a problem in it, is from 150 euros plus VAT. Sometimes that answer is to fix one document and come back in three weeks, and we will tell you that too.

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 guide is general information, current as of July 2026. Planning and property rules in Spain change, and the Valencian ones have been changing quickly. It is not legal or tax advice for your specific sale, and reading it does not make you our client.

A different town hall, a different class of land, or one open file at the planning department, and several of the answers on this page change. So before you sign anything or accept a deposit, get your own situation looked at. That is what we are here for.

Sources

Where a point on this page is not in the table above, it is how we work a file rather than a description of a rule, and it is written that way on purpose.