Assetz® News - Holiday home heartbreak

Holiday home heartbreak

5th October 2005 |

British expatriates in Spain are facing the demolition of their holiday homes and jet to let properties after they unwittingly bought homes constructed illegally on reserved land. Dozens of families in Alicante have been notified that they are living in investment property constructed without council permission and face eviction without compensation.

"This summer the council told us all our villas had been built illegally and would be demolished without compensation. We sold up to come here and now we’ll have to start again. At our age, how can we?" resident Lynn Mail, 45, who lives in a £200,000 home in the development with husband Robert Mail, 53, and daughter Michaela, 13, told the Times.

"We had been impressed by what English people in the first phase had said. Last year we moved in and we were very happy, with our daughter at a local school and my husband in part-time work. My lawyer says that really it's too late to save everything we have. There are another 19 British families here who expect the worst. We are all worried sick," she added.

Planners estimate that up to 150,000 illegal properties have been constructed in Alicante alone in a wave of cowboy construction across southern Spain fuelled by unscrupulous developers preying upon north Europeans. Much land that has disappeared under concrete remains officially designated as 'rustic' and therefore not for construction.

The Mails bought a home in a development marketed as "luxury villas in dream locactions [sic] close to the sea" by property investment company Prever 2002, run by Belgians in Alicante and sold through UK website Villa Finder.com.

Crucially, buyers were persuaded to negotiate the sale through Prever 2002's own lawyers - had they signed up with a local law firm they would have stood in a far better chance of discovering that the homes had been constructed illegally.

The families are now appealing to the Alicante ombudsman and have bought fraud charges against Prever 2002. A local lawyer said that the two year construction project could only have been completed with either complicity or gross incompetence in the local planning office however.

"We tried to stop the building from the beginning," said Senor Sanchez, local councillor responsible for planning infractions. "We took all the legal steps we could. We stuck up red posters saying "Illegal Construction," we taped off the building sites. But the builders repeatedly broke the tapes."

He added that the only legal action against crooked developers open to the council would be charges of false declaration if they attempted to obtain title deeds for the properties.

Unprompted, he said he had not taken any bribes and denied there had been any previous contact between builders and the mayors office. Nicholas Hellebuick, director of Prever 2002 said that the company had had "a very good relationship" with the local authorities, however.

"It all went wrong when there was a change of personnel in the Elche planning department," he added.