Buying, selling, conveyancing, tax, inheritance and disputes — handled by bar-registered solicitors and legal specialists who act for you alone, explain everything in plain English, and take no commission from anyone else in the deal. This is the home of all our property work in Spain.
Owning property in Spain as a foreigner is rarely a single transaction. It is a chain of moments — the purchase, the taxes that follow, the day you decide to sell, the inheritance that one day passes the home to your children, and the problems that surface in between. Each of those moments sits in a Spanish legal system that works differently from the one you grew up with, conducted in a language that may not be yours, and surrounded by people whose interests do not always match your own. Spanish property legal services exist to put one informed, independent professional on your side of the table for all of it.
This page is the home of everything Platinum Legal Spain does with property. Under one roof we handle the purchase from reservation to registration, the sale and the non-resident tax that comes with it, off-plan and new-build contracts, the Power of Attorney that lets us complete while you stay abroad, the full range of property taxes, the inheritance of Spanish real estate, and the disputes and defects that owners discover after the fact — boundary problems, community of owners conflicts, title and registry errors, embargoes and charges, and the legalisation of builds that were never properly licensed. Whether you are about to buy your first apartment on the coast or you are untangling a title problem on a house you have owned for a decade, the starting point is the same: a clear assessment of where you stand and what it will take to put it right.
Our clients are overwhelmingly English-speaking expats and overseas buyers — people who want the work done properly, want to understand it as it happens, and do not want to discover six months later that a corner was cut. We act across the whole of Spain, from the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca to the Costa Cálida, the islands and inland. With around extensive experience helping expats with Spanish property and law, our principal has seen most of the ways a deal can go wrong and most of the ways an owner can be caught out — and that experience is what this service is built to give you.
Six areas cover the life of a Spanish property — from the day you buy it to the day it passes on, and every problem in between.
Full independent conveyancing: due diligence on title, debts and licences, contract review, the deposit and reservation contracts, completion before the notary, and registration. We act only for you, never the agent or developer. See our buying & selling guide.
We manage the legal side of your sale — checking the buyer's contract, handling the non-resident retention, settling community and tax obligations, and ensuring you walk away clean. Especially important for non-resident owners with capital-gains and 3% retention exposure.
New-build and off-plan purchases carry their own risks — bank guarantees on stage payments, completion dates, licences of first occupation, and developer insolvency. We review the contract before you sign and protect your deposits throughout.
Transfer Tax (ITP), Stamp Duty, plusvalía, non-resident tax and the valor de referencia that now underpins them. We model the real tax cost of a purchase, sale or inheritance so nothing arrives as a surprise. See valor de referencia.
When Spanish property passes on death, the estate must be accepted, taxed and registered in Spain, often alongside a foreign estate. We handle the full process for heirs abroad. See inherited property and inheritance tax.
Boundaries, community conflicts, title and registry errors, embargoes and charges, and unlicensed builds needing legalisation. If something is already wrong, we assess it honestly and tell you what it takes to fix. See property disputes.
The single most important thing to understand about property legal services in Spain is the difference between a lawyer who works for you and a lawyer who works for the deal. In Spain it is common for the estate agent, the developer or even the seller to recommend "their" lawyer — sometimes presented as a convenience, sometimes as a near-condition of the sale. That lawyer may be perfectly competent, but they are not independent. When the same professional is recommended by the party trying to sell you the property, the incentive to flag a problem that could collapse the transaction is, at best, divided.
We act only for the client. We take no referral fees, no commission from agents or developers, and no kickbacks for steering you toward a particular property, mortgage or insurer. That sounds like a small thing until the moment it matters — the moment due diligence turns up an unlicensed extension, a debt attached to the property, a boundary that does not match the deed, or a developer guarantee that was never in place. An independent lawyer's job in that moment is to tell you plainly, even if it means the deal does not happen. A lawyer paid by the other side has every reason to smooth it over. This is the heart of why a genuinely independent lawyer for buyers is the best money you spend on a Spanish purchase.
Independence also shapes how we explain things. Because we are not trying to keep a transaction alive for someone else, we can be honest about whether a property is worth buying, whether a price is sensible given the tax position, and whether a dispute is worth fighting. Sometimes the most valuable advice we give is that you should walk away — and a firm that earns nothing unless the deal completes is poorly placed to give it.
Selling a Spanish property is often treated as the simple half of the equation, and for resident owners with clean title it can be. For non-resident owners — which most of our selling clients are — it carries traps that catch the unwary every year. The first is the 3% retention: when a non-resident sells, the buyer is legally obliged to withhold 3% of the price and pay it directly to the Spanish tax office as an advance against the seller's capital gains tax. If your actual gain is small, or you made a loss, that 3% may be more than the tax due — and you have to reclaim the difference, with the right paperwork and within the deadline, or simply lose it.
The second is capital gains tax itself, charged on the difference between what you paid (your acquisition value) and what you sell for, after allowable costs. For inherited property the acquisition value is the figure used for inheritance tax, which is why decisions made years earlier reach forward into the sale. The third is the municipal plusvalía, a separate tax on the increase in the land's value during your ownership, payable to the town hall. And throughout, community fees, IBI and utility accounts have to be settled and certified so the buyer's lawyer cannot hold up completion.
Our role on a sale is to make sure you complete cleanly and keep what you are entitled to keep — checking the buyer's contract, managing the retention and its reclaim, calculating the real net position before you agree a price, and clearing the obligations that would otherwise stall the deal. For owners abroad, we do all of it without you needing to fly back. See the buying & selling guide for the fuller picture on both sides of a transaction.
Buying a brand-new or off-plan property from a developer feels cleaner than buying a resale — no previous owner, no old debts, a property built to current standards. But the off-plan purchase carries risks a resale never does, because you are paying for something that does not yet fully exist. Stage payments are made during construction, sometimes over a year or more, and if the developer runs into trouble those payments can be exposed. Spanish law requires developers to secure buyers' off-plan instalments with a bank guarantee or insurance, but that protection only works if it is actually in place and correctly documented — and that is exactly the kind of thing that is easy to assume and dangerous to skip.
Beyond the deposits, new-build purchases turn on the licence of first occupation (the licencia de primera ocupación), the certificate confirming the completed property is legally habitable and can be connected to utilities. Completion dates slip, specifications change, and the contract the developer offers is written to protect the developer. We review the off-plan contract before you sign, confirm the bank guarantee on your stage payments is real and enforceable, check the developer's track record and the property's licences, and hold the line on completion dates and snagging. New builds are also taxed differently — VAT (IVA) plus Stamp Duty (AJD) on the price, rather than Transfer Tax — which changes the budgeting and is one of the few areas the valor de referencia does not touch.
Problems with property you already own are, in many ways, harder than buying — because by the time they surface, money has been spent, records have been registered, and the people involved have dug in. The instinct of many foreign owners is either to panic or to hope the issue goes away. Both are expensive. The right first step is almost always a calm, honest assessment of the legal position: what the deeds and the registry actually say, what the law allows, what evidence exists, and what a realistic outcome looks like.
Take the most common example, the unlicensed build. A great many rural and semi-rural properties in Spain include construction — a pool, an extension, an entire dwelling — that was never properly declared or licensed. It may have stood for twenty years without anyone minding, but it surfaces the moment you try to sell, mortgage or insure. Depending on the region, the type of land and the age of the build, legalisation through an AFO certificate may be possible, allowing the property to be regularised and registered. In other cases the position is more difficult, and the honest answer is that the build limits what can be done with the property. Either way, you need to know before you act, and you need someone who will tell you the unwelcome version when it is the true one.
Title and registry problems work the same way. When the deed, the Land Registry entry and the cadastral record disagree, the practical effect is paralysis — buyers' lawyers will not let their clients complete, and lenders will not advance funds, against an uncertain title. These title and registry issues are usually fixable, but the fix is technical and sequential, and attempting it without understanding the order of operations can make things worse. Boundary disputes, community conflicts and embargoes each have their own machinery; the constant across all of them is that early, accurate advice is far cheaper than a problem left to grow. Our wider property disputes work covers all of these, and where buying is concerned, our guides on red flags when buying and property scams in Spain show how many of these problems can be avoided before they begin.
Tax is woven through every stage of Spanish property ownership, and it is where foreign owners most often under-budget. The figures are not exotic, but they are numerous, and several of them changed in recent years in ways that catch out anyone relying on old advice. A property legal service that does not factor tax into the work is doing only half the job, because the tax position frequently decides whether a deal makes sense at all.
The reason all of this lives inside the legal service rather than alongside it is timing. A tax planned for before you sign is a number in your budget; a tax discovered after completion is a shock. We model the real, all-in tax cost of a purchase, sale or inheritance up front — and the wider cost of buying property in Spain brings the full set of taxes and fees together in one place.
Most of our clients are not living full-time in Spain when they buy, sell or inherit. They are abroad, working, with limited windows to travel, and unwilling — sensibly — to fly out repeatedly to sign documents in a language they do not read. The Spanish system anticipates this through the Power of Attorney (the poder notarial), a notarised authority that lets us act on your behalf for clearly defined purposes: obtaining your NIE, signing the deed at completion, paying taxes, opening accounts and dealing with the registry.
A Power of Attorney is not a blank cheque and should never be treated as one. A properly drafted POA is specific — it sets out exactly what the holder can and cannot do, for which property, and for how long. Granted carefully, to a firm that acts only for you, it is one of the most useful tools in cross-border property work: it means a purchase can complete on schedule whether or not you can be in Spain that week, and a sale or an inheritance can be handled end to end without your physical presence. We can arrange for the POA to be signed before a notary in Spain or, more commonly for clients abroad, before a notary in your own country with the appropriate apostille and sworn translation, so it is valid for use in Spain. Used well, it removes the single biggest practical obstacle to handling Spanish property from overseas.
They cover the whole life of a property: buying (due diligence, contracts, completion and registration), selling, off-plan and new-build purchases, all the relevant taxes, the inheritance of Spanish property, and disputes or problems such as boundaries, community conflicts, title and registry errors, embargoes and the legalisation of unlicensed builds. We handle all of these under one roof, acting only for you.
It is not legally compulsory, but it is strongly advisable. A Spanish purchase involves due diligence on title, debts and licences, contracts with real penalties, and taxes that are easy to under-budget. An independent lawyer who acts only for you — not the agent or seller — is the person whose job is to catch the problems before your money moves.
Because a lawyer recommended and effectively paid by the agent, developer or seller has a divided incentive: flagging a problem could collapse the deal that pays them. We take no referral fees or commissions and are paid only by you, so we can tell you plainly when something is wrong — even if it means the deal should not go ahead.
Yes. Most of our clients are abroad. We use a carefully drafted Power of Attorney (poder notarial) that lets us obtain your NIE, sign at the notary, pay the taxes and deal with the registry on your behalf, so a purchase, sale or inheritance can be completed without you needing to fly to Spain.
Due diligence is the set of checks we run before you commit: confirming who owns the property, that it is free of debts, charges and embargoes, that its licences and certificates are in order, and that what is registered matches what is built and what the deed says. It is the stage where problems are caught — before money moves rather than after — which is why it is the core of safe buying.
On a resale you pay Transfer Tax (ITP) at the regional rate, charged on the higher of the price and the valor de referencia. On a new build you pay VAT (IVA) plus Stamp Duty (AJD) on the price instead. There are also notary, registry and legal costs, and ongoing taxes once you own. We model the full, all-in cost before you commit.
It is a reference value set by the Spanish Catastro that, since 2022, acts as the minimum taxable base for Transfer Tax on resale purchases and for inheritance and gift tax. If it is higher than the price you pay, you are taxed on the higher figure. We check it for the specific property as part of advising on a purchase or inheritance.
When a non-resident sells Spanish property, the buyer must withhold 3% of the price and pay it to the tax office as an advance against the seller's capital gains tax. It is not your final tax bill — depending on your real gain you may owe more, owe less, or be due a refund. Reclaiming an overpayment requires correct, timely filing, which we handle for you.
Often, yes. Unlicensed construction is very common, especially on rural land. Depending on the region, the land type and the age of the build, legalisation may be possible through an AFO certificate, allowing the property to be regularised, registered, sold and insured. In some cases the position is harder, and we will tell you honestly what is and is not achievable.
Boundary and registry problems usually arise when the deed, the Land Registry and the Catastro disagree about ownership, plot size or what is built. These mismatches block sales and mortgages until corrected. We establish the true legal position from the documents and survey evidence and pursue the technical steps to bring the records into line.
The Spanish part of the estate must be formally accepted, the inheritance tax paid, and the property re-registered in the heirs' names, often alongside a foreign estate and will. The valor de referencia sets the minimum value for the inheritance tax, and the value used also becomes the heir's acquisition value for any future sale. We handle the full process for heirs living abroad.
We act for English-speaking clients across the whole of Spain — the Costa del Sol, Costa Blanca, Costa Cálida, the islands and inland. Because taxes such as ITP and inheritance tax are set regionally, we always apply the rules of the autonomous community where the property is located when we advise on a specific matter.
It depends on the matter, so we quote for your specific case once we understand it, set out what is included, and tell you where extras may apply — for example additional searches, complications found in due diligence, court steps in a dispute, or a legalisation process. You see the basis of the cost before the work begins, and we quote separately for anything outside the agreed scope.
Tell us about your property and what you need — a purchase, a sale, an inheritance or a problem — and we will assess the position and explain the next steps in plain English. You can book a consultation or send us the details, and we will tell you honestly what is involved before you commit to anything.
Buying, selling, tax, inheritance or a problem you already have — we act for you and no one else, in plain English, across Spain. Tell us what you are dealing with and we will tell you honestly where you stand.
The information on this page is general guidance only and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Spanish property law, conveyancing procedure, and the rates and reliefs for taxes such as Transfer Tax (ITP), Stamp Duty (AJD), plusvalía, non-resident tax and Inheritance and Gift Tax are set out in legislation that changes over time and varies between Spain's autonomous communities and foral territories. Always obtain advice on your specific property and circumstances before acting. Platinum Legal Spain is an independent English-speaking legal practice serving clients across Spain.
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