Wanted: Property - Page 2

In our case, Mercers did lie about (or if you prefer, deliberately totally misrepresent) the condition of our house both before the purchase AND after I had a survey done (after paying the 10% non-refundable deposit).

After the survey and in order to try to persuade us not to walk away and sue Mercers, Mercers got their tame "handyman" (appropriately called Wally) in just before the notary appointment to try and persuade us that our Spanish surveyor (who incidentally charged us Euro 424.28 for the survey, not £200) was pessimistic and imagining or exaggerating the faults that he listed. When Mercers realised that wasn't working, in a desperate attempt to keep the sale and their commission, they offered to negotiate a last-minute (literally hours before the notary appointment) reduction of Euro 600 with the vendors (being the price that said Wally quoted to do the necessary repairs). PALS then beat me up at the notary appointment, claiming that I had held a pistol to the vendors' head and forced them to accept this last-minute price reduction, and ignoring my statement that if Mercers had been honest with their description, we would never have chosen this property in the first place so wouldn't be in this position !!!

Once we had bought the house and returned to England, Wally disappeared into thin air, so we came back a month later and spent 3 weeks doing whatever repairs we could ourselves and arranging for contractors to do the rest - which has cost us about Euro 2200 (including the paint to redecorate the interior and most of the exterior of the house).

Lesson learnt - next time (we are planning to buy a larger house when we retire to Spain in about 2 years), we will insist on the standard UK clause of Sold Subject To Survey added into the contract (and will avoid PALS completely, although Mercers have most of the market on Camposol, so may not be so easy to avoid).

I did spot most of the flaws, but only after I visited the property in person. I trusted Mercers description before paying the 10% deposit, signing the sales contract and visiting the house (and arranging the survey), because I did not expect them to lie to me. That included Mercers listing items on their inventory to be included in the sale, that simply didn't exist when I visited just before the notary appointment.

I don't have any issue with the surveyor, he did his job correctly, listing faults which were obvious (so Mercers deliberately did not disclose them to us) and other faults that were not so obvious (although many of these should have been spotted by a qualified experienced estate agent, if not a layperson).

As I said, lesson learnt. Do NOT ever trust an estate agent, especially Mercers. They lie shamelessly to get the sale and their commission.

It sounds like we could both write a book about our negative experiences with PALS.

We finally collected our Escritura today, which PALS have been sitting on since 19th October, and because they lost it, PALS repeatedly blamed the inefficiency of the Land Registry, claiming that they still hadn't issued it. It took a visit to the Land Registry and a very helpful lady there last week to establish (once again) that PALS were lying to us (this was the same person in PALS that took 7 weeks to send us the POA forms, that had errors on them, so we had to wait another 5 weeks to get these corrected - then they blamed US for causing a huge delay in the sale of the house !!!).

And despite being told last month that it was not company policy for PALS to issue their clients with copies of the bills paid to the various authorities, after causing a scene in their office and threatening to file an official complaint, we were given a copy of these invoices today, and eagerly await the refund of the Euro 452 from PALS that we overpaid in September.