24/09/2026
On Tuesday I spent the morning in front of a room full of estate agents in Cádiz, explaining why some sales to foreign buyers fall apart.
Fotocasa Pro Academy asked me for the whole picture: who this buyer is, what they actually want, and where it can go wrong. Over twenty years of doing this and the answer has barely changed. It is almost never the price. It is the fear of buying something that turns out to be illegal, the paperwork nobody mentioned, and the small cost that appears at the notary.
One slide was about how to speak to a British client. I told them how in a pub in Britain nobody says "give me a b**r", they say "could I have a b**r". It is the same with property: tell that person "sign the contract this afternoon" and it puts them off, even if they could not tell you why. My clients have told me the same thing for twenty years; the way an agent spoke to them decided who they hired.
Then the practical side. A non-EU buyer now needs military authorisation for rustic land on this coast, and both the NIE and the power of attorney are better started at the reservation than in the week of the deed. I went through Modelo 210 as well - the annual tax due on a property even when nobody is renting it out, and one with no equivalent in the UK - and inheritance in Andalucía, where the 99% relief now reaches non-residents too.
I finished with five questions I would want any agent to ask before writing a reservation contract: nationality and tax residence, how the land is classified, NIE and power of attorney, who is buying and with what money and whether the buyer has been told every cost.
If you are buying here, you are entitled to ask those questions yourself and a good agent will be glad you did.
Thank you to FotocasaPro for the invitation, and to everyone who came to find me afterwards with their own case. Those conversations are usually the best part of the day.
If any of this applies to a property you are buying, or one you have inherited, we are here to help.
