If you are thinking of buying land on the Costa Blanca or any other part of Spain, here is a step-by-step guide so you don't make any mistakes.

What do you have to do to buy a piece of land in Spain?

1. Request the Simple Note in the Property Registry, to know:
Who is the owner of the land?
If you are free of debts or charges.
The existence of possible mortgages.
Obtain the Cadastre number of the land.

  2. Request the Cadastral Certificate in the Cadastre, to obtain:

• The location of the plot of land
• Your cadastral reference
• The actual surface
• Its use and destination
• The cadastral value
• The owner of the property with the tax identification number or foreign identity
• The type of cultivation or use (if applicable)
• The quality of the constructions (if any)

  3. Request the Deeds of the land and receipt of the IBI to the owner

If the owner or real estate agency has not yet given you a copy of the first pages of the deeds of the land that you are interested in buying; request it. Verify if the data in the announcement and provided in the deed match the simple note and the Cadastral Certificate. It also requests the receipt of the annual payment of the IBI / Real Estate Tax; that tells you that the owner of the land is up to date with the payments.

If you want to know the taxes and expenses of a home on the Costa Blanca,read this article from the real estate agency Naranja Spain.

How much can I build on a piece of land in Costa Blanca?

  4. Request the Urban Development Certificate

This document expands the information on the type of land and details the type of housing (if any) and the supplies available.

The important thing to keep in mind here is that you know the different types of soil and what use of them is allowed by law in Spain:

• Urban land. It is the one that is included in the current urban plan of a territory.
• Undeveloped land. The one that has some type of protection that makes it unsuitable for constructions such as rustic or agricultural land.
• Developable land. It is a land in transition that will become urban at the end of the transformation.
• And that there are two other very important values to take into account: occupation and buildability.

The buildable area is the total square meters that we can build; all built floors count, here the porch counts (normally) at 50%.
Occupancy is the percentage of the land surface that we occupy with the house, including the porches (not the terraces). In some town halls they count the pool. This data is more important than the buildability when we build the house on one floor. The occupation is usually somewhat higher than the buildable area.

How many square meters can I build on land in Spain?

We explain it to you with an example to make it easier to understand the essential concepts to know how many meters we can build on a piece of land in Spain, depending on the available buildable area and occupancy.

Let's imagine that we have a 900m2 building land with a buildable area of 0.5m2/floor and an occupation of 30%

Half of the land; in this case 450 m2 in total, adding the surface of each one of the floors.

We already know that we can build a 450m2 house; now to know how we can distribute the square meters in the allowed heights; we need to know the maximum occupancy (that we can use on our land)

In this case, a maximum occupancy of 30% is allowed over the 900m2 of land; they are 270m2. This means that the first floor cannot occupy more than 270m2, from here you could build 2 floors until you exhaust the remaining 180m2 of surface area allowed by law.

5. Request a geotechnical study

Before buying and starting any new construction on a piece of land, it is necessary to know the physical characteristics of the soils and rocks that form it.
The most important characteristics that we will value when building on a piece of land are the admissible tension of the ground, the depth of the water table and the topographic survey and its relationship with geotechnical studies; The latter is essential at the Administrative level since the municipal ordinances require, to communicate the expected date for the start of the works and for this it is necessary to have the restatement of the plans, which is carried out in the topographic survey.

If you want to invest your money together with the best real estate experts on the Costa Blanca, we are Naranja Spain real estate; Your perfect team to make the purchase or sale of your land or home in Alicante a complete success.

Contact any of our real estate agents, where we can inform you in Spanish, English, Russian or Lithuanian about the process of buying and selling a land, home, business premises or garage in Guardamar del Segura, Torrevieja, Punta Prima, La Zenia, Campoamor even northern areas of Alicante such as Calpe, Denia and Benidorm.