Our Community Forum is now up and running again.

Maybe some of you are wondering why my blog has not been updated for a while. Well, tomorrow I make the first leg of my journey to Portugal by car. I will be stopping off in Dorchester overnight to spend some time with family and to say goodbye. During my last trip not all was a disaster, I managed to get a job whilst I was there, so this means I’m packing up a few worldly goods and I’m on my way.
It will be hard, I’m leaving my family and my beloved pets behind but as the saying goes ‘No pain, No gain’. At the same time there will be some advantages. I will be renting initially and I will get to see any property that comes onto the market first hand as my job will be with a registered estate agent.
I’m very excited and very nervous at the same time. My husband will be driving down with me, we will hop on a ferry at Plymouth and set sail at 12:00 noon on Wednesday. We will dock In Spain, Santander and drive down to Portugal. This will be approx. an 8 hour drive, providing we don’t get lost.

I will be starting a new blog where I can hopefully keep friends and family informed of what is happening on a day to day basis. As soon as this is set up I will put a link on my blogroll. I will still be keeping Dream Portugal alive so please keep checking back.

Upon meeting and greeting the ‘agent’ we were swiftly hustled off to view the property. The land was was absolutely gorgeous, the tiny house which comprised of a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom was finished to a very high standard with good potential to extend, however, I had a nagging feeling that the house was not licenced as dwelling. I asked the agent to get copies of the cardeneta’s, its should state on that paperwork what the building is registered as. If it doesnt have a pre-1951 certificate or a habitation licence then it is more than likey registered as a barn or a store of some sort.

Needless to say the building was not registered as a dwelling despite making a few emails and phone calls to the agent before embarking on this inspection trip. I was irritated to say the least because everytime I make an inspection trip, it costs me in the region of £600-£800!

However, this was just the start of a string of problems that were about to occur. When we left the property and arrived back at the agents house he promptly asked me that if I was interested would I mind under declaring the purchase price of the property upon completion. This is a common problem when trying to purchase in Portugal because the vendor normally wants to pay less capital gains tax. This is not only highly illegal but will come to bite you in the bum when and if  you decide to re-sell because on paper you would of made more profit than in reality. The way they get away with it, is by asking you to pay X amount ‘above board’ and then the remainder in cash.  Not good! and although you will be assured that this is ‘normal’ the authorities have long since cottoned onto it and they are clamping down quite a lot.

Anyway I obviously said to the agent that I would not be at all interested in doing business in this manner, which irked him somewhat.  At this stage I was still keen on the property and in my mind I was trying to figure out a way to get the property registered with a habitation licence. The agent then hit me with something even I couldn’t of dreamt up - he told me that on completion the funds must be deposited into HIS account! This was unbelievable, after all I had only just met the fellow for less than an hour and he was fully expecting me to trust him with handing the funds over to the owner.

This was not going to happen, I had made up my mind  that I would let my legal representitive deal with that if I chose to proceed with the sale. As the evening went on he also insisted that he would be my representitive. For obvious reasons this would not be very wise, seeing that he had a vested interest in the sale as he was to be paid a commission from the vendor, hence the reason as to why he was hell bent on the funds being paid to himself first. The way I read that was, he didn’t want the vendor to know how much commission he would be lining his own pocket with.

The next day the agent took me to the land registery so that I could check out that the property did indeed belong to the owner and also to check out that all teh land that was included in the sale was correct. Obviously the agent requested these papers on my behalf as my Portuguese is very limited. When we got the certified copies I was asked for €115.50. That was fine but as we left the building I asked the agent for the copies as I had paid for them and they are now mine. He refused to hand them over, claiming that they were his! In the first place the owner should be paying for any paperwork such as that and secondly he had no right to keep them. Great!! It’s at this point I have made up my mind that no matter how much I loved that property I was not too happy about doing business with this guy. In effect he is sitting with papers that I had paid for and more than likely he would sting the next lot of unsuspecting buyers for them and still keep them in his possesion.

I was allowed photocopies of the original paperwork I had paid for so I took a 3 hour drive through mountains to get them looked over by a friend of mine  in Tabua. I had worked out for myself that the land was not as much as had been described on the property details but I wanted it all double checked anyway.

The agent was using really hard core selling tactics which I had never experienced before on my previous 4 trips. He was pushing to by pass the Promessa [deposit contract] and go straight for the escruito on teh friday, we were on wednesday when he let this bombshell slip! Of course I knew that I wouldn’t be going any further with any of this and decided we would be leaving a day early because I simply couldn’t stand being around this guy a minute longer.

My husband and I decided to take a leisurely 3 hour drive to Lisbon to spend our last day and evening in the City. I was so relieved to leave that place I just can’t express it enough in words. On the way to Lisbon I decided to ring up a contact that I had met online, Derek and his partner Nicky have a registered estate agent in Tomar. Tomar is about 1 hr 10 mins from Lisbon. It really is a great Town with lots going for it. It was so refreshing to meet people who were professional and doing things above board that I nearly cried! We had a long chat about my experience over several espresso’s and lunch. They have over 500 properties on their books and  kindly took us to see a few before Derek had to head off to another appointment.

That evening we decided we were too tired to drive on to Lisbon so we stayed in a fabulous hotel in Tomar.

The next day we decided to take a quick trip back to the property we were both very keen on, it was a lovely little house in a great village about 15 mins from Tomar. We both loved this place and saw great potential for it but unfortunately someone had just put in an offer and I wont know until Monday if it has all gone through.

So that’s it in short, back to square one with the property hunt but at least I definitely know which area I would like to live in now.

If you have any questions with regards to property purchase in Portugal please contact me, I will do my best to help and what I don’t know I shall find out for you.