Land Classification for selling

As most of you probably know Zurgena managed to agree a Plan General Ordenacion Urbano (PGOU) back in 2019.

This plan meant that all houses within our municipality were given a clear legal standing and so avoided the problems many other THs had with legality. In fact it created the best legal situation for property owners as, prior to this, none of the houses built in the past 20 years in most of Spain were considered, by the regional authorities, to be on legally recognised land. For those of you who have lived here for more than a few years you will be fully aware of the issues that this resolved.

The Town Hall has been working through the complicated process of upgrading the first few hundred but it is a painfully slow process. I am awaiting clarification of what progress has been made on this and will add to this post when I get that information which hopefully will be later today or tomorrow.

Obviously for those who wish to sell their properties it is a bit of an inconvenience, to not know what or when costs may arise for their particular property. 

Most solicitors when acting for buyers, of properties on urbanizable land, are aware of the situation and usually ask for a reduction in the sale price to offset any potential costs to the new owner for consolidation of the land in the future.  In my case I accepted a reduction of €5,000. My house was on land classified as urbanisable.

A further complication arises for those houses, of which there are still a few dozen, which are classified as being on rustic land.These are houses which for various reasons cannot at this stage be incorporated into the PGOU and in these cases a good solicitor, acting for a buyer, will request that the seller obtain an  Asimilado Fuera de Ordinacion (A.F.O.) There is a complicated formula for calculating how much this document (which is obtainable from the TH) costs. I have given a breakdown below of an example of a house of 150 sq metres with a pool, garage and pergola.

House (is calculated at €600 per sq metre) so 150 sq m house = €90,000

Garage (50 sq m at €400 per sq m) = €20,000

Swimming pool 8 x 4m (32 sq m at €300 p sq m) = €9,600

Pergola (20 sq m at 150 p sq m) = €3,000

Total €122.600 

The cost of the AFO is 3% of that total 3% of €122600 = €3,678 

There is additional cost of the technician required to do the paperwork and they usually charge €500. 

So the costs of a AFO for a house on rustic land is not greatly different to the roughly estimated cost for consolidation of a house on urbanizable land.

If anyone wants to ascertain the classification of the land that their property is on just email me. 

I am returning to Spain for a week at the end of this month and will make myself available for anyone wanting to discuss anything but this will only be for a few hours one day during the week commencing 25th September but I can of course answer many things electronically.