4 definite Do´s of Spanish Real estate
I have met a lot of real estate agents over the last couple of years, but I think I met the worst one ever yesterday. Or didn´t quite meet. Because she didn´t show up. I sat like an idiot waiting for an hour, but no real estate agent.When I finally got through to her, she didn´t even apologize!
Crisis
Even though we´re in the middle of a crisis, apparently, Spanish real estate agents are obviously not catching on. If you are trying to sell your property, here´s four pointers from a slightly disgruntled potential buyer:
- Take your own pictures. The pictures of properties on real estate websites are lazy at best. Random shots of bits of the ceiling, half a toilet, all kinds of garbage laying about or a dog doing its business. Clean it up a little. Even a ruin looks better when there´s no ripped garbage bags in the picture. Wait for a sunny day, put some flowers in a vase. You´re trying to sell something, so make it look good!
- Check the description of your property on the agent´s website. Especially if you´re a native English speaker and your real estate agent is not, it can be helpful to sort out the grammar. Actually, even if your real estate agent is a native English speaker you may want to check.
- Label your key with something huge, like a purple dinosaur key ring. Many´s the time I´ve been hauled up some remote mountain, only to hear at the very end that actually, no, they couldn´t find the key, but we can have a look through the hole in the roof, if we just climb on top of that rickety old table…. A massive key ring means they may not be so quick to lose your key!
- Go away. Nothing quite as unnerving as having the current owner skulking around the house. One guy insisted on showing me around his heinously ugly house himself and I spent an uncomfortable twenty minutes pretending to be interested in every tile he´d put in his massive, festering swimming pool. I kept expecting a dead body to float up. Needless to say I didn´t buy that one. Another owner actually picked a fight with me over my shoes. Not a great idea either.
