An informal guide and ten personal tips as to what you should think about when buying a second property in the sun (or the snow!)

I am sure that most of us have been somewhere on holiday and said ‘wouldn’t it be lovely to have a property here’… but spending holiday time in a place and then actually going to live there (even part-time) can be two very different experiences. In case you are one of those people that is crazy enough to think about doing it, then here are ten personal tips from someone that has done it a few times!!

1. If you really do want to buy a home in another country, then it makes sense to visit there out of season and see whether it really is as idyllic as you think. Ask the locals (not just the ‘local locals’ but foreigners living there too – in our experience, the locals will tell you how lovely it all is, the foreigners often want to tell you all the problems they have come up against! The reality is probably somewhere between the two!).
2. Don’t ask the real estate agents (sorry, much as we love some of them!).  Their job is to sell you a property, any property, and they are very skilled in figuring out what it is about a place and/or area that you, in particular, like or dislike, and then give you lots of assurances that it has whatever that is!   If you have seen a property you like, go and snoop about outside on your own – it’s amazing how much you can find out that the agents might not tell you – the road close-by seems very quiet on a Sunday afternoon and is, in fact, a nightmare on a busy weekday morning, the sunshine that apparently is there on an afternoon (when you visited in the morning) or vice versa, the neighbours coming and going, the builders around the corner that weren’t there when you visited on a weekend, the spookiness at night-time, the traffic going up and down to the restaurant at the end of the road – we have seen it all by being nosey!
3. Don’t appoint lawyers/surveyors/designers/builders just because they speak English – that doesn’t mean that they are good!   Plus they are usually much more expensive than the locals, just because they can be.  
4. Check the flights/other transport links.  I know it sounds obvious, but that flight you took in the summer during peak holiday season may not go in the winter (let alone during Covid!!!) – in fact, for many destinations, there may not be any flights at all at certain times of the year – and if you want to be able to visit your second home easily and regularly, you really don’t want to be spending all day getting there (Malaga, thankfully, has become a bit of a hub and it is easy to get to and from Marbella nowadays…. It hasn’t always been so, and definitely isn’t the case with other places in Spain).
5. Think ahead – if you really fall in love with a place (and since you are planning on buying a property there, you must at least like it!) – there may come a time when you want to visit it more often than you are planning at the moment.    For example, whilst you might not be concerned that it is cold in winter when you only plan to be there in the summer, that might not always be the case.   Or what about if you don’t fall in love with it and end up regretting buying - will it be easy to sell the property to someone else if that happens?
6. Something else that you may not even think about if you have always stayed in hotels or serviced apartments: Creepy crawlies.  You probably wont see them if you have always stayed in a lovely hotel or serviced apartment.  But if you have an aversion to any specific creature, you might want to ask the locals if there are any problems with them!   Our first house in Spain, for example, was in an area that had a problem with cockroaches – not that we knew that when we first moved in.    The first time I found a cockroach in the bedroom it was nearly enough for me to put the house on the market there and then.   Thankfully we don’t see them often nowadays – but we have friends in other countries where snakes can be problematic in the gardens (parts of Cyprus and Greece), mosquito nets throughout the houses are an absolute necessity (Italy and Turkey), and then there are other creatures that I don’t even want to mention….   
7. The costs of actually buying – I can’t speak for anywhere else, but I know that we were shocked when we started to think about buying in Spain and found out that the actual cost of buying is around 10% more than the actual price you are paying, by the time you cover all the different notary, legal and other local fees.   So be sure to allow for that before you set your maximum budget.
8. The costs of running your second home – remember that you can’t just switch off all your electricity, water, WIFI etc when you leave your second home (well you could, but would you want to go through the horrible performance of getting them all switched on again?!).  So whilst you wont be using all of these things when you are not there, you still have to pay for them to be connected.  
9. Then there are other fees – in Spanish urbanisations (even some stand-alone houses are part of some form of urbanisation) - there are monthly fees for the common parts.  Also in Spain annual fees for the rubbish collection (even if you haven’t been there and haven’t made any rubbish), non-resident taxes, in some cases wealth taxes, and then one-offs such as insurance and so on.   I can tell you, it ain’t cheap!
10. Despite all of the above, it is a truly fantastic thing to be lucky enough to have a second home – somewhere that you can run off to (during Covid, to get some sun, to get some snow, to get some whatever.....) – and, mostly, it will end up being an investment.  Of course, from a cost point of view, and despite the likely increase in value when you come to sell it, it probably makes no sense – we worked out when we bought our first house that we could stay in the penthouse of the nearest 5 star hotel pretty much every month forever, and still have money left over compared to actually buying somewhere – but would we have done that?  Probably not.  And do we regret it?  NEVER! How could we when we can be out looking at views like this in the middle of winter!