The Buyer Pays for Haste

There is a question that almost no buyer asks, and that orders all the others: whose haste is it? It is rarely the buyer’s. It usually belongs to a seller with a cash-flow problem, to an agent whose quarter is about to close, or to a date that someone put on the table and nobody bothered to question.

Haste, in a purchase, is not a speed: it is a waiver of verification. And like every waiver, it has a price. What happens is that the price does not appear in the escritura (the notarial deed of sale), but eight, eighteen or forty months later: when the licence that was missing prevents letting, when the extension that nobody declared blocks the resale, or when a derrama (an extraordinary levy voted by the comunidad de propietarios, the owners’ association) arrives in the name of whoever signed without having read a single set of minutes.

The international buyer also starts from a structural disadvantage that is best stated plainly: they do not command the language in which the risk is written, they visit the property for three days and decide the rest from a distance. In those conditions, time is not a convenience. It is the only instrument of verification they have.

Signing in haste does not save time: it defers it. And it always defers it onto the buyer’s side.

The exact point at which a transaction is lost is almost never the escritura. It is the contrato de arras (the deposit agreement, whose legal effect depends entirely on how the contract characterises it: unless it expressly provides for arras penitenciales under Article 1454 of the Civil Code, the courts presume that neither party may simply walk away), signed within forty-eight hours to “secure the property”, with a substantial part of the price already committed and the checks left for later. From that moment on, the buyer stops negotiating and starts asking. Any defect that appears (an encumbrance, a discrepancy in floor area, open planning proceedings) arrives when there is no longer any leverage to discount it from the price, only to argue over who keeps the deposit.

The right order

The order we defend is old and unspectacular: first you check, then you commit money. An up-to-date Land Registry extract (nota simple), read in full; the situación urbanística (planning position) of the plot, not just of the building; the licence for the works that can be seen and for those that cannot; outstanding community charges and local taxes; and, if there is a tenant, the complete contract rather than the seller’s word. None of this is exotic. None of this takes months: it takes days, and they are days that can be negotiated in writing.

Hence the title of this piece, and its reverse too: good transactions look neither fast nor slow. They look orderly. When a client tells us their purchase was calm, it almost never means it was slower; it means that none of the important decisions was taken on incomplete information. Pace is not a merit. It is a symptom.

There is an honest exception: sometimes the opportunity is real and the window is short. Even then, the answer is structural rather than temperamental. A reserva (reservation agreement) with conditions precedent drafted by whoever will later have to defend them; a verification period agreed in writing; a clean exit if what should not appear does appear. One can go fast. What one cannot do is go fast and blind at the same time.

A purchase done well is not remembered. It leaves no anecdote, no litigation and, five years on, no telephone call on a Monday morning. It is the most exact definition I know of our work, and the reason we insist, above all with clients who are in a hurry, on returning the only question that matters: whose is it?