Buyer Pays 150,000 Euros for Movera Villa, Demolition Ordered

150,000 euros for a villa without permits, now facing demolition

Can a house without property registry records be legally sold? In Movera, near Zaragoza, the answer cost a woman 150,000 euros and a demolition notice. She bought a villa, paid for it, and days later received a letter from Zaragoza’s Urban Discipline Service: the land is designated as a garden, the house was built without permission, and it must be torn down. The dream of a house with a garden came after lockdown, when this woman and her family were squeezed into 70 square meters. The case ended in a fraud complaint.

How a house without deeds is sold

The ad read: “Sale of a villa house, 900 square meters of rural land in Movera.” It circulated on three portals — idealista, milanuncios, and pisos.com — and she saw it in September 2020. The property has 900 square meters and is registered as rural land or a family garden. There was no building permit or deed, and it could not have one: the plot has been declared since 2007 as Special Non-Urbanizable Land for the Protection of the Agricultural Productive Ecosystem. On that basis, the local government only permits demolition.

Why did the price drop by 25,000 euros overnight?

The asking price was 175,000 euros. The buyer warned she could not afford it without bank financing, and no bank would grant a mortgage on a house without deeds. The sellers then lowered the price to 150,000, and the deal was signed without a bank involved. She had previously paid 3,000 euros as a reservation fee. In hindsight, the sequence makes sense: without a mortgage, the transaction closes in days, and no one asks too many questions. On closer inspection, it smells fishy.

The property note said so, yet she still signed

Before signing anything, the buyer demanded to see the property’s basic note. The document stated: “Rural. Irrigated family garden in the municipality of Urdán.” She replied that there must be an error, that she was reserving a villa. She was told, according to her account, that this was the official note and that the house was in a state of illegality that would soon be resolved. She trusted the real estate advisor. What she did not know at the time, according to her story, is that the agent handling the transaction was the brother of the seller. The local government has been collecting the property tax (IBI) on the house since 2006.

Why did the court dismiss the fraud complaint?

The complaint was eventually dismissed. The Fourth Court of Instruction in Zaragoza closed it on July 25, and the Third Section of the Provincial Court, after reviewing reports from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and lawyers Javier Osés, Bartolomé Arranz, and Ainhoa Zoco, found no incivil wrongdoing by the sellers. The reasoning: they cannot be accused of fraud since they provided the buyer with the property registry note. In other words, the document that the law considers sufficient protection was on the table.

What remains for the buyer?

She has two avenues left. The administrative route, where her lawyer, Ana Guzmán, will try to prove that the local government’s right to restore urban planning legality has expired: the house has paid property tax (IBI) since 2006, which forms the basis of the argument. And the civil route. “We have been barred from the incivil path,” summarizes the lawyer, who insists that this could happen to anyone because not everyone is prepared to handle a real estate transaction. The dismissal, she says, was a very hard blow.

This villa is not the problem: thousands are in the same situation

Behind this case lies a much larger phenomenon. It is estimated that there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of illegal constructions in Spain, classified as outside planning regulations, with all statutes of limitation expired and standing for decades without anyone demolishing them; some add that in areas like Andalusia, most country houses are in this situation, and local governments have been stepping up efforts to regularize them over the past couple of years. The uncomfortable question is why action is taken against this one and not the others.

From the buyer’s side, it is recalled that the signs were there: the registry note, the impossibility of a mortgage, the below-market price. From the seller’s side, the counterargument is that the illegality was disclosed, the price was lowered, and the buyer assumed the risk. What no one disputes is that demolition is the worst possible news for someone who has just paid.

The house exists, has paid property tax (IBI) since 2006, and was sold for 150,000 euros. There is only one small problem: to the registry, it is a garden, and to the local government, an error that must be demolished.