The process, step by step

You tell me what you are picturing. A village, a sea view, somewhere to retire, somewhere for August, something you can rent out in between. I ask a few questions and give you a straight answer about whether I am the right person to help.

Sometimes the answer is no. If you have been coming here for fifteen years, speak enough Catalan to argue with a builder and already have one you like in Palafrugell, you do not need me. I would rather say that in the first twenty minutes than at the bottom of an invoice.

This one is about the Costa Brava, not about houses. It is the conversation I wish somebody had sat me down for before I moved here.

We cover how life actually runs. What the coast looks like in February when half the shutters are closed. How a comunidad de propietarios works and what it can decide without asking you. What a house costs to keep standing every year, which is a very different number from what it costs to buy. How people communicate here, and why “next week” is a real answer rather than a delay.

None of it is dramatic. It is just different from what you are used to, and the people who accept that early have a much easier time of it than the ones who spend three years being surprised.

You come out of this hour with a realistic picture and, more usefully, a shorter list of what you actually want.

After the intake I send you a questionnaire. Budget, and then the honest budget once transfer tax, notary, registry and the first year of repairs are in it. How many weeks a year you will really be here. Winter or summer. Whether you plan to rent it out, and whether you have looked at what a tourist licence involves in that particular municipality. How you feel about stairs, about a garden, about neighbours in August, about being a fifteen minute drive from a bakery in February.

It takes roughly half an hour to fill in and it tends to start a conversation between couples. That is deliberate. Better to have that conversation at your own kitchen table than in someone's hallway with an agent checking his watch.

I take your brief to the estate agents I work with. Not all of them. The ones who pick up the phone, who tell me when a house has a problem before I find it myself, and who have not yet tried to sell me something I would not buy.

What comes back is one, two or at most three properties. Not a portal full of tabs. If nothing fits, I tell you nothing fits, and we either widen the brief or wait for the autumn. An empty shortlist is also a result, and it is a cheaper one than the alternative.

I come along if you want. The agent will show you the terrace and the light, and rightly so, because the terrace and the light are why you are here in the first place.

I look at the rest. Where the damp line sits on the wall and how far up it has climbed. Whether the roof was repaired or simply covered over. What the empty plot next door is zoned for. Whether the pool has a proper pump room or a cupboard with ambitions. What the previous owner clearly gave up on, and in which year.

I do not negotiate on price myself. That is work for a licensed buying agent, and if you want one alongside you we can arrange that before the viewings rather than after them.

I am not there to talk you out of anything. I am there as the person who will still be honest after a good lunch.

For the property you are most serious about, you get it in writing. What condition the building is really in. What I would expect you to spend in the first three years, using prices from this coast rather than from a spreadsheet. What I would fix first and what can wait. What I would use to negotiate. And, when it applies, what I would walk away from.

Every report walks the same points in the same order, so you can lay one next to another: the structure and the roof, the electrics, the water, the waste water, the heating and cooling, the garden and the pool, the gates, the papers, and getting to the house at all. Where I could not get to something, a crawl space under a fitted cupboard or a flat roof with no ladder to it, the report says so rather than leaving you to assume I looked.

The report is advisory. It is not a legal survey, it is not binding, and I do not sign off on anything. It is the written opinion of somebody who repaired and maintained houses here for a living, put on paper so you can read it twice and sleep on it before you decide.

One report is included. If you want a second property written up as well, we agree that before I start, not afterwards.