Our TV home hunters from 2019 have bought a home in Gran Canaria!
It was four years ago that retirees Colin and Richard flew out to Gran Canaria with Jean Johansson looking for a home for £200k. After nearly buying four different properties, renting two homes on the island, a pandemic, and applying for their Spanish residency, the couple have finally just bought a home.
The couple from Glasgow, whose episode of A Place in the Sun was broadcast in 2021, were shown to put in an offer on a property – the first that fell through - are hugely relieved. “Renting a property while we spent periods out in Gran Canaria looking for a home had its advantages,’ says Colin. “The market was moving so fast after Covid that you had to be in a position to respond very quickly or you would lose out.”
As it was they did lose out three times. With two of the properties, the vendor in each case asked them for a portion of the sale price in ‘black money’ – a sum of money paid in cash that does not go through the official paperwork, or is recognised on the title deed, so less tax is paid.
“Our lawyer of course advised us against accepting this, not only is it illegal but we would risk losing our residency,” says Richard, who like Colin used to work in the education sector. They would also face paying more capital gains tax when they sell – as the full price would not be on the deeds.
The couple also faced rising prices. They realised their £200k budget would not pay for a two-bedroom bungalow on the complex in Playa des Ingles where they loved renting. “We compromised on location and have bought on a smaller complex in Maspalomas,” says Colin. “It’s got a smaller pool and fewer properties with less landscaping, but in effect it’s still only 15 minutes’ drive from the centre of Playa des Ingles.”
An upside is the community fees a lower - €180 per month, including water and utilities – and they managed to pay just under their €200k budget for the two-bedroom duplex bungalow. “We were paying €1,000 a month to [long-term] rent a place which we weren’t occupying for most of the year – but we had to do that to keep up our residency – so our outgoings are now a fraction of that,” adds Colin.
The active couple spend their days cycling, hiking and going to the gym, and will use the property especially during the winter months. “We might have got our residency – via a Non-Lucrative Visa – but our lawyer warned us not to spend more than 183 days on the island as we would become tax resident, which we don’t want to do,” says Richard. As such they would be liable to Spanish wealth tax.
The couple advise finding a good agent you can trust and also using a good lawyer. They also learnt the hard way about dealing with agents. “So many times we saw adverts for properties and emailed but didn’t hear back. We found it much more effective to pick up the phone,” says Colin.
Read more
Their lawyer also helped them on their NLV application. “Unless you speak fluent Spanish it’s pretty hard to do it without one,” he adds. They used A Place in the Sun Currency to transfer their funds to Spain but got stung when they transferred their funds from a Barclays Euro account to their Spanish notary. “We got charged €600 just for the transfer. If we’d transferred it to our Spanish Santander bank account first, this wouldn’t have happened. That’s a hidden charge to avoid if possible.”
But now the couple are delighted to be enjoying their days on the Atlantic Ocean archipelago without scanning the property listings and having to deal with the searing temperatures of mainland Spain’s heatwave. Another unsung advantage of the Canaries, perhaps!
