Buying off plan (sobre plano)

Off plan — sobre plano in Spanish usage — means agreeing to buy a home that is still a set of drawings, a licence and a building site. The legal path differs from buying something that already stands: you sign first, pay in instalments, and become the owner at the end rather than at the beginning.

What the buyer is actually signing

The document is a private purchase contract between you and the developing company. It is not a deed, and it makes you the owner of nothing. What it does is bind the company to build one specific unit and hand it over, and bind you to pay for it on an agreed rhythm.

A contract worth signing describes the thing being built in enough detail to argue about later. It should carry the plot and its registry details, the plan of your unit with its surfaces, the specification of materials and installations — the memoria de calidades — the price with the tax shown separately, the payment schedule, the period for completion and the handover procedure.

Whatever the sales material promised and the contract omits is, in practice, not promised. Show-flat finishes, a parking space, a storage room and the orientation of the balcony all belong in the contract or in an annex signed with it.

What the stage payments are tied to

Money moves in tranches. A first amount falls due on signature, a sequence of instalments runs through construction, and the balance is paid on the day the deed is signed, usually at the same moment any mortgage is drawn down.

The instalments in between should attach to events a third party can verify, rather than to dates alone:

• the structure reaching an agreed level, or being topped out
• the roof and the façade being closed
• partitions, installations and interior finishing
• the licence that permits occupation being granted, and the unit being ready for handover

Where a schedule mixes milestones with calendar dates, ask what happens to the dates if the works run late. A plan that keeps collecting instalments while the building stands still leaves the buyer financing the delay.

Why advance payments carry a guarantee

Spanish law does not let a developer treat off-plan instalments as ordinary turnover. Sums received from buyers before handover have to sit in an account dedicated to the works, and each buyer must receive an individual guarantee — a bank guarantee or an insurance policy — covering the amounts paid, with interest.

That guarantee exists for one scenario: the building is not delivered, or is delivered without the licence that makes it habitable. The buyer then claims against the bank or the insurer instead of queueing behind the company’s other creditors. As the developer, SAVO is the party that opens the dedicated account and arranges the certificates.

The buyer’s side of it is clerical and matters anyway: collect a certificate for every payment made, check that the amount on it matches the amount that left your account, and keep the set until the deed is signed. A certificate that never arrives is a reason to pause the next transfer and ask why.

How it differs from buying a finished flat

Both purchases end in the same place, a deed and a registry entry. Almost everything before that is different.

• What you inspect. Plans, a written specification and perhaps a show flat, instead of the actual rooms, the actual light and the actual stairwell.
• When ownership passes. At the end of the works, not weeks after the offer was accepted.
• What protects the money. The statutory guarantee of advances across the whole construction period, rather than a short exposure between contract and deed.
• How it is taxed. A first transfer sits in the value added tax regime with stamp duty on the deed; a resale sits in the transfer tax regime. The split is set out in taxes on a Spanish purchase.
• What follows handover. A snagging list and the developer’s statutory liability for defects, rather than the condition you accepted on viewing.

In exchange for the wait, a buyer gets a new building, a say over finishes while there is still time to have one, and payments spread across the construction period instead of a single transfer.

What to settle before the first transfer

Six questions are worth answering on paper before any money leaves your account:

• who is registered as owner of the plot, and whether anything is charged against it
• whether the building licence has been granted, and by which authority
• which bank or insurer guarantees the advances, and which account receives them
• how the specification treats substituted materials, and who decides what counts as equivalent
• what the contract says about delay, and what the buyer may do when the period passes
• which of the costs at the deed fall to the buyer

None of this calls for a courtroom; it calls for the documents to be read before the money moves. A Spanish lawyer acting for you, independent of the seller, is the normal way to have that done. The notary who later authorises the deed will verify title and charges, but not whether the commercial terms were fair to you.