Setting A Date For Our First House Hunting Trip
In early summer, we booked our flights for a mid-August house hunting trip. We’d fly into Barcelona, stop and see our friends in Valencia and then drive on to the Jávea/Dénia area to check out the heart of the Costa Blanca. It would give us the opportunity to drive down the coast for 3-4 hours, check out Valencia and then continue south to Alicante, where we’d take the high speed train back to Madrid and fly home. It would give us a chance to check out the roads, the drive times and accessibility to key cities in Spain.
While we love Alicante, we knew that the city itself was a bit bigger than what we wanted for a place to live. We wanted to be close enough though, so we could visit. That’s how we ended up finding Jávea and Dénia. They’re equidistant between Valencia and Alicante (an hour either way, plus airport access at both), and they’re set right on the coast itself. That meant we had a good chance of fulfilling one of our goals: a house with a sea view, close to the beaches.
With reservations done, the next step was finding a real estate agent and a lawyer. With all we’d discovered during our research about what’s necessary to complete a move to Spain, we knew we needed a Spanish lawyer. Could we have done it ourselves? Yes, but the extra time, language barriers, etc. would have been difficult, time-consuming and extremely frustrating. Having a Spanish lawyer was going to be key.
Doing our research, we found Pellicer & Heredia. They had a lot of great reviews from other expats who had moved to Spain. Another advantage was they had an office in Jávea, so they’d be right in the city we were moving to, which would make make in-person visits much easier.. One thing we also liked was the amount of free resources they had on their site to do research on all of the key things we’d encounter with a move to Spain.
Next up, was finding a real estate agent. On our August trip, we wanted to start looking at houses to get a feel for what we could afford, what we would get for the price, as well as get a picture of what day-to-day life would look like. We had been researching various companies, but one in particular stood out. VillaLux. They had a lot of positive verified reviews and a strong presence online. Lots of information about the purchase process, house tour videos, neighborhood information, etc. They were also a smaller real estate firm, which was what we wanted. We needed a firm we could trust to provide great service and not just be another expat client looking for a place to live.
Now it was just a matter of getting prepared for our August visit, starting to be “boots on the ground,” and seeing what we could make happen.