Buying a plot: the twelve-point check before you sign

Almost every expensive problem in a project was decided on the day the plot was bought. Afterwards they can be managed, but they can no longer be avoided.

The site visit verifies almost nothing. What decides whether a plot is any good sits in documents, and all of them are public, almost all of them are free, and none of them takes more than a few days. This is the complete list.

The four that can end the purchase

1. The certificado de tradición y libertad

The land registry extract is the document that reveals most for the least money, and it has to be read right through rather than glanced at for the last entry. On it appear restrictions on ownership, injunctions, mortgages, recorded easements, reservations and falsa tradición.

Two entries deserve particular attention. Falsa tradición means that whoever appears as the holder transferred an incomplete right: what is sold is what was held, which may not be full ownership. And the assessment of the betterment levy on the uplift in land value, where it is recorded on the folio, is an obligation that travels with the property and has to be paid before a permit can be taken out.

2. The class of land

Urban, expansion or rural. It is not an administrative label: it decides whether the plot can be built on today, in some years’ time, or never.

Buying in expansion land with no partial plan adopted is buying a plot that cannot be built on today, and that cannot be subdivided either. The seller is not lying when they say it "is going to be urban": it may well be. What nobody can tell you is when, and that is the whole difference.

3. The Unidad Agrícola Familiar, if the land is rural

In the countryside there is a limit on dividing land, and breaching it is punished not with a fine but with something worse:

Absolute nullity means the transaction never existed. It is the reason there are rural plots sold, paid for and occupied whose buyer can neither convey them nor obtain a permit for them. And it is not cured by time or by good faith.

4. The hazard or risk zone

A property classified as being in high hazard, or in risk that cannot be mitigated, may simply not be capable of being permitted. In medium hazard, or in high hazard that can be mitigated, the permit may be made conditional on detailed studies and on mitigation works that sometimes cost more than the plot.

It is checked with the municipal disaster risk management body, and it also appears in the written ruling on the planning rules. It is the enquiry most people leave out and the one that produces the most expensive surprises.

The eight that change what may be built

5. The written ruling on the planning rules

It is the photograph of what the rules allow on that property: use, planning treatment, ratios, heights, setbacks. The verbal enquiry is free by law; the written ruling, which is the one you can rely on if you have to make a claim, costs 8.34 UVT wherever there is a curaduría. It is the starting point for everything else.

With one warning worth understanding before you lean on it:

6. The ratios, and which area they are applied to

The índice de ocupación, the site coverage ratio, measures the footprint of the building on the ground; the índice de construcción, the plot ratio, measures the square metres of every storey added together. Both are defined in national rules, but the numbers are put in by the POT of each municipality, sector by sector and by planning treatment.

And there is one question that saves more money than any other: which area is the ratio applied to? The national definition speaks of the total area of the property, but several land-use plans apply it to the net developable area or to the usable area, both of which are smaller than the plot you are buying.

7. The road reservation

It is a strip of the property held back for a future public work. For as long as it lasts, that strip cannot be built on. The reservation has to be recorded to be enforceable, so it is looked for on the certificado de tradición and confirmed in the written ruling on the planning rules.

8. The watercourse buffer

A strip of thirty metres on each side of watercourses and a hundred metres around springs. It is protected land: nothing is built on it and nothing is paid for it. On a long narrow plot crossed by a stream, it can take away half the usable area without anything in the deed announcing it.

It is checked with the competent regional environmental authority, the body that delimits the buffer.

9. Easements

Of way, of water mains, of power lines. The recorded ones are on the certificado de tradición. The ones in fact are not. A track the neighbours have been using for twenty years may appear on no paper at all and still be perfectly enforceable.

10. Listed cultural property and protected areas

If the building or its surroundings are declared listed cultural property, work on it requires a concept design approved by the cultural authority before the permit. It is a complete additional procedure, with timescales of its own.

And if the property sits inside a protected area, the regime of permitted uses is set by the management plan for that area, not by the POT. It is checked against the national register of protected areas and against the lists of the Ministerio de Cultura and of the local heritage institute.

11. Area and boundaries

The area in the deed, the area in the cadastral record and the area a topographic survey comes back with rarely coincide. The difference may be a few metres or a whole strip, and on rural plots it tends to be larger.

12. The availability of public services

A main running past the frontage does not mean there is availability. What counts is the certificate of service availability issued by the utility, and in some municipalities that document is today the real bottleneck of the permitting process.

On rural land the question changes shape: it is not whether there is a network, but what solution of your own is needed for water and for wastewater, and what environmental permit each one calls for.

The table, to take with you

What to write into the promise of sale

Many of these enquiries take longer than the negotiating window lasts. The way out is not to skip them: it is to write them in as a condition.

1. 1A condition subsequent tied to concrete outcomes: that the written ruling on the planning rules confirms the intended use, that there is no recorded reservation, that the property is not in risk that cannot be mitigated.
2. 2Enough time for the enquiries that depend on somebody else. The regional environmental authority and the risk management body do not answer in three days.
3. 3Area and boundaries according to the survey, not according to the deed, with the rule for what happens if they differ.
4. 4Full return of everything handed over if the condition is not met. Without that clause, checking does not protect you: it only informs you.

What cannot be checked from a screen

• —The real access. A road that exists on the map may be a disputed easement, or may not be passable in the rainy season.
• —The topography. A steep slope does not appear on the certificado de tradición and it changes the cost of foundations, cuts and retaining walls completely.
• —The ground. The geotechnical survey conditions the foundations, the foundations condition the structure and the structure conditions the project. Commission it as soon as you have the plot, even before drawing anything.
• —The neighbours and what they are building. It is free information and it usually tells you more than the POT does.

It circulates that below a certain area no soil survey is needed. That assertion is worth distrusting. What does stand up is that the law requires a geotechnical engineer answerable for the survey, even in the houses of one and two storeys that are excepted from independent technical supervision. The exception is one of supervision, not of survey.

In short

A plot is bought with three documents in hand — the certificado de tradición, the written ruling on the planning rules and a topographic survey — and with two enquiries already made: risk and the watercourse buffer. Everything else follows from there.

It costs a few days and almost no money. Compared with what it costs to find out afterwards, it is the best investment in the whole project.