What to check before you buy

Reviewed 26 October 2026. We manage properties from Estepona to Sotogrande, which means we see what a home costs to run and what it can earn long after the sale is done. If you buy through us, our fee is paid by the seller.

Five checks, in this order. The order is the point: it is the order of the money, not the order of the excitement.

One. What the property can actually earn

Before the lawyer, before the licence, before anything. If the numbers do not work, the rest of the list does not matter.

Agents quote yields. We would rather show you what comparable properties in that same community are actually achieving, using professional short term rental market data, and tell you what we see. Occupancy and nightly rates in these communities vary more by street, by orientation and by season than most buyers expect, and a figure calculated for a different property two hundred metres away is not an answer about yours.

We will also tell you what comes off the top, because that is where published yields quietly go wrong: the platform's fees, the housekeeping between guests, the annual bills, and the tax, which depends on where you are resident and can differ sharply between two owners earning the same rent.

Two. The community of owners

In an apartment or a townhouse this is where most properties stop, and it has been the decisive check since April 2025.

Letting to tourists inside a community used to be allowed unless the community had forbidden it. That is no longer the case. Article 7.3 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal now requires the owner to obtain the community's express approval first, and article 17.12 sets the majority: three fifths of the owners, who must also represent three fifths of the participation quotas. Silence is not consent.

Three things to establish before you make an offer:

• Whether the community has already voted, and how. A minuted decision of a general meeting is the only answer that counts. A reassuring word from the president is not one.
• Whether the property already holds a registration that was in force before 3 April 2025. If it does, the older position may carry on. If it does not, you will need that double three fifths majority, on the community's meeting calendar rather than yours.
• Whether the community has increased the share of common expenses charged to properties used for tourist letting. It is entitled to, up to twenty per cent, and that is a permanent cost on your side of the ledger.

Three. The licence

Either the property has a live registration in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía, or it is capable of getting one, or it cannot be let at all.

Ask for the registration certificate and check the number is live. Our guide to the tourist rental licence covers the rules in full. Every code is now issued as VUT, and homes registered under the old VFT prefix were converted automatically, so a listing still showing VFT is simply out of date rather than invalid.

If there is no registration, the question becomes whether the property meets the physical requirements, which are specific and non negotiable, and whether the community will approve. Both can be established before you commit.

Four. The municipality

Town halls may set proportionate limits on tourist homes in their area, including a maximum number per building or per zone, and some on this coast have used that power while others have only talked about it. The position differs from one town to the next and it changes.

So this is not a question with a general answer. It is a question about your address, checked on the day you ask it.

Five. The clause that can destroy the licence between the offer and the notary

This is the one almost nobody warns buyers about, and it is the most expensive mistake on this page.

A registration survives the sale. It attaches to the dwelling, and the new owner keeps the same number by filing a change of ownership with an updated extract from the Land Registry. But if the seller requests the cese, the voluntary cancellation of the registration, the cancellation is definitive. It cannot be reinstated. You would start from nothing, and now under the stricter community rules.

So before you sign: make sure nothing in the contract has the seller cancelling the registration, and make sure the seller understands that cancelling it as tidying up destroys part of what you are paying for.

A shorter list, and a different one.

• What it costs to hold. The five annual bills, from the actual documents rather than from an average. Our guide on what it costs to own a home here goes through them.
• The community's accounts, not just its fee. The approved budget, the reserve fund, and the minutes of the last two or three meetings. Minutes are where you find out that the roof terraces are being redone next year and every owner is contributing.
• The condition of the things that are expensive to put right: roof, terraces, damp, pool plant, air conditioning, and the electrical installation. A survey is worth its cost on this coast, and it is not customary here, so you have to ask for it.
• And the question people forget until the first winter: who opens the shutters, runs the taps, checks after a storm and meets the plumber during the ten months a year you are somewhere else. A house closed up for months does not stay as you left it.

We are not your lawyer and not your tax adviser. The title, the debts and the contract belong with a lawyer, and the tax with a gestor fiscal. We can point you to both.

What we add is the part that is normally missing until after completion, when it is too late to be useful. We read the market for that specific property and tell you what we see. We check the community's position and its accounts. We establish whether the property can be registered, or whether its existing registration is live and not at risk of being cancelled. We put real numbers against the running costs, from the property's own paperwork.

And because managing properties here is what we do, we can also look after it afterwards if you want that. That is an option, never a condition of anything on this page.

If you are looking at something specific, tell us where it is and what you want it to do, and we will tell you what we find.