Five expensive mistakes British buyers keep making on the Costa del Sol

Glaser Real Estate signs roughly 80 transactions a year, around 35 of them with British buyers. After seven years of this, the pattern is depressingly stable: the same five mistakes keep showing up, and they cost the same buyers the same money. None of them are about offering the wrong price for the wrong apartment — that's the easy mistake to avoid. The expensive ones are the ones British buyers don't even know they're making until they own the property.

1. Skipping the comunidad due diligence

The single most expensive recurring mistake. Buyers fall for the apartment and forget that they are also buying into the building's comunidad de propietarios — the homeowners' association — with whatever financial and operational baggage that comes with.

A "good" comunidad has: no arrears, a published reserve account, a maintenance schedule that covers the lift, the pool plant, the roof, and ideally a derrama (special levy) history that is short or empty. A bad one has: persistent neighbour disputes, an underfunded reserve, a derrama just voted in that the seller hasn't told you about, and an administrator who isn't returning calls.

Before you offer, you can — and should — ask for: the most recent acta (minutes of the AGM), the budget for the current year, the reserve account balance, and any derramas voted in the last 24 months. If the seller's lawyer can't produce these in 48 hours, that itself is the answer.

A €30,000 comunidad derrama for a roof repair, voted three weeks before you completed and disclosed nowhere, will sour an otherwise-perfect purchase faster than any tax surprise.

2. Underestimating the ITP / transfer tax

British buyers consistently arrive expecting Spain to be cheaper to buy in than the UK. They are partly right (Spanish prices per m² are often lower for comparable lifestyle) and partly wrong (Spanish purchase costs are significantly higher).

In Andalucía in 2026, ITP (Impuesto de Transmisiones Patrimoniales) on a resale apartment is a flat 7%, applied to the higher of the declared price or the cadastral reference value. There are reduced rates in specific cases (under-35 buyers, large families, certain disability cases; or 6% when value ≤€150,000 and habitual residence), but the default rate for foreign buyers is 7%.

For a €600,000 apartment in Marbella that means roughly €42,000 of tax on top of the asking price. Add notary, registry, lawyer fees and the all-in cost lands around 10–12% of purchase price.

For new-build (off-plan or first-sale), it's different: 10% IVA + 1.2% AJD, all-in roughly 12–14%. The most common mistake is budgeting the headline price and being short €50,000 at closing. Full process and cost breakdown here.

3. Believing the off-plan completion date

Spanish off-plan developments run late. Almost universally. Six to eighteen months past the contractual completion date is normal, not exceptional. If you're a British buyer with a fixed plan ("we sell our UK house in October and complete in Estepona in March"), an off-plan delay can put you in temporary accommodation for a year.

What to do: read the contract for late-completion penalties (most are weak, in favour of the developer); ask for the licence-of-first-occupation timeline explicitly; talk to the lawyer about retention clauses; and most importantly, plan a 12-month buffer between expected and required handover dates. If you cannot afford that buffer, buy resale instead.

The new-build share of Andalucía transactions is real — Mitma publishes the quarterly numbers — but so is the delay culture that comes with it. We discuss this trade-off in detail in off-plan vs resale.

4. Banking last, not first

British buyers tend to leave the Spanish-bank-account opening until they're almost at completion. By then, KYC requirements have tightened, the account-opening process takes 4–8 weeks, and the buyer ends up paying for emergency wire transfers from a UK account at a 2–3% FX loss versus a planned currency transfer through a specialist broker.

The correct order: NIE → Spanish bank account → currency-transfer planning → offer. If you've started looking and you haven't opened the bank account, do it next week. The account opening itself is free; the FX loss on a €600k transfer can run €15,000–€18,000 if it's last-minute.

The working order

NIE (typically 1–4 weeks if applied in Spain in person) → Spanish bank account (2–4 weeks) → currency-transfer broker engaged → then offer. Compress this and the savings are real.

5. Picking a lawyer the seller recommends

It happens more often than it should. The seller's agent recommends a lawyer "who handles a lot of these," the buyer accepts, the lawyer turns out to also work regularly with the agent's side, and you've quietly given up your only independent advocate in the transaction.

The fix is simple: your lawyer should be someone you found independently, not someone in the chain. Costa del Sol has a number of genuinely independent firms that handle foreign-buyer transactions. They charge roughly 1% of purchase price plus 21% IVA, with minimums commonly in the €1,500–€3,000 range, they speak English fluently, and they answer to you only.

We won't recommend a specific firm to you ourselves — that would defeat the point of the recommendation. But if you ask us, we'll give you three names of firms we know our buyers have been well-served by, and tell you to pick the one whose responses feel most like the way you think.

One last thing

None of these mistakes are about being clever or being lucky. They're about doing four things in the right order, knowing where the money actually goes, and picking professionals whose only loyalty is to you. The buyers who avoid all five aren't buying better apartments than the buyers who don't — they're just spending €50,000–€80,000 less to get there.

If you're about to start, ask us anything. We'd rather you spend an hour on this site than fifteen minutes on a portal, and the email reaches a real person on the team.

Five expensive mistakes British buyers keep making.

Have a question we didn't answer?

1. Skipping the comunidad due diligence

2. Underestimating the ITP / transfer tax

3. Believing the off-plan completion date

4. Banking last, not first

5. Picking a lawyer the seller recommends

One last thing

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