Does anyone ask their lawyer to do the utilities connection

Does anyone ask their lawyer to do the utilities connection on completing of a property? If so, do you pay the lawyer for the fee to deal with the connection & also pay Iberdrola for the connection fee?

My neighbors who used their lawyers to do the connection just paid their lawyers for the connection fee & when Iberdrola charged them for the connection fee, their lawyers refunded the Iberdrola`s connection fee. I paid my lawyer to connect as well as Iberdrola who took money from my bank account & my lawyer refuses to refund me the connection fee.

Most lawyers do this work for EUR200 to EUR300. But that fee does not include fees payable for new contracts or contract deposits etc.

It some areas this work has become quite difficult work depending on if new bolitins are required on setting up new contracts and also now Endesa are sometimes insisting on someone being there if they come out etc etc. So some are saying arranging all this is not part of the service which can necessitate getting in electricians and arranging upgrade of installation + new bolitin etc

Each company, Town Hall or Community has different ways in which they will accept new details and in most cases a personal attendance is required etc.

If this was the UK all could be done over the phone or internet and no contracts to sign but not in old Espana!

Most lawyers would rather not do this work as it's time consuming and tedious for the small procedural fee normally charged. So unless you have some junior person or gestoria on board it's a real pain. But you can not abandon your client although some do!

You need to read the small print and you will probably find the lawyer asked for a fee plus money on account to pay for new contracts/deposits and each provider works differently ie some of the water offices want the contract fee paid in cash other will take contrcat fees by dd and so on.

I paid 450 euros to the lawyer plus having to pay Iberdrola another 168.27 euros while my neighbors paid 280 euros 2 years ago & got their Iberdrola's fee refunded.

I haven't signed any contract with the lawyer, only used emails to ask him to do the connections  & he didn't send me anything to sign. i only trusted my agent to use this lawyer & not even sign anything with him. Never again to use any agent's lawyer.

You were robbed!

When engaging lawyers you have to look at the fee for the whole job and pay VERY close attention to the extras.

Some lawyers just like the car hire companies will quote a cheap initial fee and then fleece the client on the extras such as drafting POA for execution in UK, NIE application, transfer/set-up of utilities etc etc

Of course if peple are stupid enough to use the lawyer recommendedby the agent and not query fees or insist upon a letter of engagement then what do you expect?

Most lawyers must pay commission back to the agent that intoduced the client and that means they have to load their fee - that's the fee that you pay!!

One thing you can be sure of is they will not rock the boat and bite the hand that fees them - so don't expect them to caution you against buying that particular property!!

Question - if you are buying property in Spain how many times do you want to pay commission. When the agent brings you to the furniture shp he is getting commission - when he introduces a builder or maintenance company he's getting commission.

If you're not around to do the necessary work yourself I guess you have a price to pay for the convenience. Our lawyer took care of all connections and when I went out to arrange furniture and noticed that the gas had not been connected one phonecall to the lawyer was all it took to get it done. I was pretty pleased with that. On the other hand it probably pays to get used to how things work and where you have to go to sort things out with your utility provider.I don't know if this is a common occurence but last summer, three years after most occupants completed on their townhouses, a guy on a scooter came along and disconnected the water supply to a number of houses. First thought of course was that the bills had not been paid. Everybody swore that they were up to date. So, of they went to the supplier. As it turned out everybody was up to date. Unfortunately there had been a week or so between the initial connection and the date from which the supplier started to bill. Over 3 years a small amount reached the critical mass that trickered the cut off. No one ever bothered to ask for that money nor was warning given. I checked my own situation straight away and sure enough I would have been in the next round of cut offs. I paid 8 Euro plus interest and that was that but the other guys had to pay to be re- connected which happened fast enough afterwards. Even so all of this was a major pain in the behind the girls in the office were extremely helpful so it was hard to be angry.

I think it's not only us foreigners who are baffled by how things work here. Last year in our ayuntamiento we were sitting at a desk opposite a very friendly and helpful clerk who tried to explain something to us. After looking into our blank faces he said ,, I don't understand it either...and this is my job!''

Yes I know that I've been robbed & stupid enough to use this lawyer. I learned my lesson not to trust anyone no matter how good a person seems to be.

I think the mistake made by most is to think that a Spanish lawyer practises with the same level of professionalism and intregrity as do UK solicitors.

Many Spanish lawyers refuse to put anything at all in writing and do not issue standard letters of engagement despite it being a requirement of their colegio.

In the UK if a solicitor pays a referral fee then that must be disclosed to the client - that does not happen in Spain!

The whole commission thing really bugs me - everybody wants commissions - in the Uk we do it on more of a network basis - with reciprical referrals etc - but with the clients best interest at heart and not who will pay me the biggest commission.

But you live and learn ..... which is

It's five years since we purchased our old village house in valencia for 42,000 euros-so the lawyer fees have probably changed since then-and I can't find all the paperwork at the moment, but we paid a total of approx. 3,000 euros.

For that we passed power of attorney to the solicitor as we are still full time in the u.k.- and he arranged NIE x2, bank account +credit card,electricity and water supply connections and direct debits,letters to the town hall and visits to the notary.

The house was a probate sale, so took a year to go through the legal system, and he kept us up to date via emails and 'phone calls, and gave us his mobile number to contact him at weekends if we had any questions. He detected a couple of  mistakes in the original declared  m2 of the property and had that put right  prior to purchase.

We were very pleased with the service and were quite happy to use him for the spanish will making procedure (extra) at a later date. We also used him to do some preliminary work for us when we considered buying an investment apartment about a year and a half ago. Excellent result--he came up with at least 3 illegal clauses that the promoters had put in the contract + a heap of other stuff that made him uneasy about going ahead ( this was the day before we were due to put down a 6.000euro deposit)

So, on his advice we pulled out of the deal--and mighty glad we were !  Some 6 months after we would have made final payment if we'd gone ahead with the deal we just had to go take a look at the development site, and it was a half finished abandoned looking place. We had been told by the promoters that there wouldn't have been any problem with getting a mortgage on the place as a rental property-but our own investigations have since proved otherwise.

Not all solicitors are sharks ! You just have to go trawling to find a good one. Our guy even appologised for having to charge us 150 euro for the work that he did on the aborted appartment purchase, but as he said-" You pay me to keep you out of trouble"

One bit of advice that he gave when we first met him five years ago was " Don't ever buy anywhere outside of an established village, town or urbanisation"-and seeing the sad stories that crop up we're glad that we followed his advice.

When you're still living full time in the u.k. and can only visit your spanish property a few times a year-and don't have much spanish vocabulary- it's good to be able to have the legals and financial/tax stuff taken care of by some one you can trust.( not everything can be done online)

As ever- when employing a solicitor -DYOR

Of course there is the odd good one there - probably about 1 in 10.

Many of the problems people are in today is simply becuase of bad legal advice.

More lawyers should have been doing/saying what your lawyer said to you but how can a lawyer do that if the source of the client is the Estate Agent and that agent is walking in with 10 or more clients a week? and of course these lawyers were not going to amend/revise contracts and risk losing all that business.

and what surprises me most is the very few that are buying these days are still making the same mistake and going with the lawyer recommended by the agent!

crostrad - you should name your lawyer .....

If you are able to organise the utilities in person, it will obviously save you a lot of money!  If your Spanish isn't that good, it will probably be cheaper to pay someone to translate for you rather than paying for a lawyer, however John and I managed to do the following on our own, in spite of our limited Spanish: water, gas and electricity connection.  We did use a Spanish friend when we were trying to get connected to the internet, only because we assumed that we must have got it wrong!  In fact, we hadn't.

Sue

Yes I know my mistake & break the rule when I used the agent's lawyer because i trusted the agent. Never again to use any agent's lawyer even when you can trust the agent. I've done a lot research & read a lot in EOS before I purchase & should have listened to what EOS members said about NOT using agent's or builder's lawyer.

My (ex) lawyer was arrested under suspicion of money laundering and had all assets frozen including those he holds on behalf of clients but last I heard he was still practicing.

But, as I said earlier, he was a wizard with the utilities.

      just to let you know we connected with iberdrola about 6 months ago using the telephone only,they have a dedicated english speaking dept to do this,the water was easy we went to the local office in the morning and it was connected in the evening. I do have basic spanish but if you go in with the right paperwork its fairly obviouse what you want and most spanish i find try to be helpful,sorry this info is too late for you forhotspot.

Thanks Dave.

I could have done it myself instead of being scammed by the lawyer. I wasn't connected till 3mths later after I moved in. I was on builder's supply.  Even the NIE application,  I could have done that too instead of paying the lawyer 375 euros as I  completed  the villa unofficially without the NIE as the lawyer screwed them up in the appilcation. I hope I'll get the NIE certificates as I still haven't got them now.

If you employ a lawyer to do the conveyancing for you, that should include the changing of the utilities into your name. It should not cost extra, Lawyers charge anything from 1 to 2% as fees for conveyancing so that should be more than enough to cover all the work including changing the utilities to the new owner.. I would recommend Marbella Solicitors who only charge 0.75% of the price for their services and this includes changing the titles of all the utilities and VAT, and they do everything for you.