The process

Buying a property in Spain from Ireland, step by step

The sequence is fixed and reasonably short. What goes wrong is almost never the paperwork itself, it is doing the steps in the wrong order.

Hispan Estates · published 12 September 2026 · 8 minute read

Most people who ring us have been thinking about it for years and have no idea what the first move is. The good news is that the sequence is fixed and reasonably short. The part that goes wrong is almost never the paperwork itself, it is doing the steps in the wrong order.

This is the journey, start to finish.

1. Work out the real budget before you look at anything

Not the asking price you can afford. The total you can afford, which is the price plus roughly 10% to 14% in taxes and fees on top. Get that number straight first, because every property you look at before you have it is a property you are judging against the wrong figure.

If you need finance, sort out in principle where it is coming from at this stage too. Irish banks will generally not lend against a property in Spain, since their security sits here. That leaves a Spanish mortgage secured on the Spanish home, releasing equity here, or cash.

2. Narrow the area before you narrow the property

People do this backwards. They fall for a specific apartment, then work out afterwards whether they actually want to live in that town in February.

Decide what the place is for first: a fortnight in summer, the winter months, an eventual move, or something you will mostly rent out. Each of those points at a different kind of location, and the answer changes the tax bill as well, because transfer tax is set regionally and varies by several percentage points across Spain.

3. The viewing trip

Two or three days, properly planned, will tell you more than six months of scrolling. A few things that make the difference between a useful trip and an expensive one:

• See the area at the time of year you will actually be there, or at least talk to somebody who has.
• Walk the route from the property to the shop, the beach and the nearest bus stop. Photographs are taken with a wide lens and from the good side.
• Look at more than one town. Comparison is the only thing that tells you whether a price is reasonable.
• Have somebody check the basic legal position on each property before you travel, not after you have decided you want it.

4. The offer and the reservation

When you find it, you make an offer. If it is accepted, the usual next step is a reservation: a modest payment, frequently between €3,000 and €6,000, which takes the property off the market for a short agreed period while the checks are done.

Do not pay a reservation on a property whose paperwork nobody has looked at. This is the single most common way Irish buyers lose money in Spain, and it is entirely avoidable.

5. The checks

This is the part that protects you, and it happens between the reservation and the binding contract. At a minimum somebody should be establishing:

• Who legally owns the property, from the Land Registry record rather than from the seller's say-so.
• Whether there is a mortgage, a charge, an embargo or an unpaid debt attached to it, because in Spain debts of that kind follow the property rather than the person.
• Whether what is built matches what is registered. Extensions, terraces glazed in and pool houses added without permission are extremely common and become your problem the day you sign.
• Whether the building has the licences it should have.
• Whether the community of owners is owed money on the property, and whether any major works have been voted for and not yet paid.
• What the annual running costs actually are, in writing.

6. The contract that actually binds you

Next comes the private purchase contract, normally a contrato de arras. You typically pay 10% of the price at this point, and from here the sale is binding on both sides. The standard arrangement is that a buyer who walks away loses the deposit and a seller who walks away repays it doubled.

Read this one properly, in English, before signing. It sets the completion date and the terms, and everything after it follows from what it says.

7. Signing

Completion happens in front of a notary. The deed, the escritura, is read out, the balance is paid, and the keys change hands there and then. Most of our clients travel out for this, and it takes an afternoon.

If travelling is genuinely difficult, it is possible to complete through a notarial power of attorney granted to somebody you trust to act for you. That is a decision to take deliberately and with advice, not as a convenience.

8. Afterwards

The transfer tax is due within thirty days. The deed is registered in your name at the Land Registry. Utilities and the community account need to be put into your name and set up to pay by direct debit, which matters more than it sounds when you are not in the country.

Then there is one annual obligation that Irish owners routinely miss: Spain requires a yearly return from non-resident property owners, even when the property earns nothing at all. Set it up in the first year and it becomes a formality. Ignore it for five and it becomes a letter.

How long does all this take?

From accepted offer to keys, eight to twelve weeks is normal, and it can be faster on a cash purchase with clean paperwork. The part that varies is everything before the offer, which depends entirely on how clear you are about what you are looking for.

Which is, more or less, why we start there.