The seven mistakes Dutch buyers make on Tenerife.

I have watched every one of them. Sometimes twice. These are the mistakes you can avoid without a lawyer, a translator, or a second trip.

n the last three years I have represented, or been close to, eighty-one Dutch, German and Belgian buyers on the Canary Islands. Of those, seventy-four made it to the notary. Four backed out for personal reasons. Three lost deposits of between €10,000 and €28,000 because of mistakes that are, in retrospect, so preventable that I keep a list of them pinned above my desk.

This is that list. It is not a complete taxonomy of Spanish property mistakes — for that you would need a longer piece, and probably a separate writer. It is specifically a list of the mistakes Dutch buyers make, in the order I have seen them made, with the price attached.

Assuming the listing price is a starting point.

It isn't. On Tenerife, the listing price is whatever the selling agent put in the window, usually because the seller asked for it and the agent didn't want to argue. It is almost never the price the property transacts at, and it is almost never a reasonable anchor for a negotiation.

Dutch buyers, in particular, are trained by Funda to read listings as statements of intent. Spanish listings are closer to opening gambits. On the four properties I recommended last month the median opening price was €445,000. The median transacted price was €402,500. Nine percent, consistently, is where the room lives.

Signing the arras without reading every page.

The contrato de arras is the ten-percent earnest-money contract you sign once an offer is accepted. In theory it is a standard instrument. In practice, every agency has a template, and every template has clauses favourable to the seller. I have seen three Dutch buyers, in the last year alone, sign away their right to recover the deposit if the mortgage is declined — a clause the Spanish law leaves to the parties to negotiate.

Read every page. If your Spanish isn't strong enough for that, have it read to you by someone whose is. A clause you didn't notice is still a clause you agreed to.

Not checking the community accounts.

The comunidad de propietarios — the homeowners' association that manages the building — has its own finances, and they are, by Spanish law, transferable with the property. If the community has approved a derrama for a new facade, a new roof, or a new pool, and you buy after that vote, you inherit the bill. Fourteen thousand euros for a facade in Costa Adeje, last November. That was a real buyer, and a real cheque, and it did not need to happen.

Request the minutes of the last three annual meetings before the arras is signed. They are in Spanish, usually badly photocopied, sometimes hand-written. Read them anyway. They are the clearest picture of what the building is actually costing, and what it is about to cost.

Treating the notary as a formality.

The notary is not a formality. In Spain, the notary is the legal officer who makes the sale binding — and who catches the paperwork errors everyone else has missed. I have sat in notaries' offices in Santa Cruz, Arona, and Adeje, and I have watched them stop the process three times in the last year: once for a registered easement the seller hadn't disclosed, once for an IBI (council tax) debt of €1,800, once for a cousin who was on the title but had not signed the sale.

If the notary pauses the process, let them. The fifteen minutes they take to check a thing is the cheapest insurance you will buy this year.

Buying based on a holiday.

A week in Costa Adeje in February is not a month in Costa Adeje in August. The strip that feels charming when the tour buses have stopped for the season is a different strip at ten o'clock on a Saturday night in high summer. Before you buy, you want to have visited the street in the worst month of the year — which, depending on the property, is August for heat, November for tourism, or January for the wind. If you can't do that yourself, ask me. I live here, and I can walk the street on a Saturday night in August and send you a voice-note about it.

Not budgeting for the taxes.

The €400,000 apartment is not a €400,000 apartment. It is a €468,000 apartment with a €400,000 purchase price and €68,000 in taxes and fees. I have written a separate piece about this, but the single most common mistake I see, year after year, is a Dutch buyer arriving with exactly the purchase price in the bank, and then scrambling for ITP, notary, and legal costs in the final week. Do not be that buyer. Bring the 17%.

Choosing an agency because it has a Dutch-language website.

The Dutch-language website is an acquisition tool, not a service guarantee. Half the agencies on the island that advertise in Dutch use a single freelance translator in Alkmaar, and have no Dutch-speaking agent on site. By the time you discover this you have already signed their reserva.

Ask, before you sign anything, whether the person you will be negotiating with speaks your language. If the answer is “we can arrange a translator”, you want a different agency.