How one Manchester couple bagged their ideal home in Spain
Buying a place in Spain? It can get emotional. Andrea and Robert Clapham from Stockport found their perfect home, nearly lost it (cue first set of tears) and then managed to secure it thanks to a little estate-agent magic (second set of tears).
It all began at A Place in the Sun’s Manchester exhibition this year when the couple began to look for a home. “I’d got a good pay off after being made redundant,” says Robert, 60, who’d been the head of adult learning at a sixth form college, “so we had some money, and we thought we should seize the moment and follow our dream of having a home in Spain.”
Feeling rather bamboozled by all the information available, they were getting a little despondent. “Hearing all the advice from estate agents, lawyers, financial experts and visa people, it was all sounding a bit complicated,” says Andrea, 54, a school science technician originally from Albany, New York “but listening to the seminar on buying in Spain, I was keen to hear Mark Rawlings’ [owner of agent Your Dream Home] straight talking so we followed him back to his stand. He allayed our fears and said, ‘Don’t worry, we can take care of everything’.”
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The next month Andrea and Robert flew out to the Costa Blanca to look at properties with Maria from Your Dream Home. With a budget of £110,000 the Southern Costa Blanca would offer them a good choice of options. After looking at homes in Cabo Roig, Le Zenia, La Mata and Torrevieja, they fell in love with a two-bedroom apartment in Los Balcones, a popular urbanisation south of Torrevieja, an easy half an hour from Alicante airport.
“The first-floor apartment had been modernised and the huge roof-top terrace – across the whole footprint of the house – that’s what sold me,” says Andrea. “You can see the southern tip of the pink salt lake [Lago Rosa de Torrevieja] from it.”
The property was on sale for €102,000 but they decided to offer €99,000. “Maria phoned to make the offer and was told that the vendor had accepted an offer four days earlier,” says Robert, “at which point Andrea started crying uncontrollably. In her mind we had already bought the place.”
“I told Maria that we’d offer £105,000 – anything to get the property. She told us to sit in a café across the road whilst she made some calls. I don’t like to think we introduced gazumping to Spain,” laughs Robert. “We sat and waited. It was the longest hour of our lives.”
“Finally Maria came back. It turned out that no proof that the other party had made the offer, or paid the deposit, could be produced. ‘You’ve got the house!’ she said. Cue more balling from Andrea.”
