Marbella Old Town · New build & off-plan
Buying before completion in the old town, where nothing is built new
Nothing is built from the ground up inside Marbella's walls, because there is no vacant ground. What is sold before completion here is a conversion: an existing house stripped back, re-serviced and divided into units under licence. The guarantee, the cover periods and the licence order all behave differently on that.
- Municipality
- Marbella
- Province
- Málaga
- Part of
- Marbella
Start from what the quarter physically is. The wall line was fixed in the fifteenth century, the plots were set when the medina was cleared to open Plaza de los Naranjos, and the institutions inside them — the town hall, the parish church, the print museum in the Hospital Bazán — are not going to release land. So a scheme advertised as new build inside the walls is a rehabilitation with a marketing name. That is not a criticism. A well-run conversion produces genuinely new services, new floors and a new deed. But a buyer needs to know which product they are contracting for, because the two carry different obligations.
The practical difference shows up in the order of permissions. Where the property touches or adjoins protected fabric — and much of the quarter does, given the castle and its wall line — the heritage authorisation is required before the town hall issues the building licence, not alongside it. That single sequencing point is why old-town timetables slip and coastal ones do not. Ask the promoter for the date of the heritage authorisation and the number of the licencia de obra, in that order. If the second exists and the first does not, the programme you have been shown is not real.
What is actually being built inside the walls
Honestly: nothing, in the sense a coastal buyer means. There is no development land inside Marbella's wall line, no phased scheme, no show apartment and no price list. What exists, continuously and in small numbers, is conversion work — a house bought whole, stripped to its masonry, re-roofed and re-serviced, then divided into two or three units and registered as such. Those units reach the market before completion often enough that the off-plan question is a fair one to ask, but the answer is always about a specific building rather than about a pipeline.
The licence context is what a buyer should be reading instead of a brochure. Works are licensed by the Ayuntamiento de Marbella, which publishes its own instruction on how building-licence applications are processed. Where protected fabric is affected, the heritage authorisation comes first as a matter of statute. And the units themselves only exist once the declaration of new work and horizontal division is executed and registered. Three documents, in a fixed order, with named issuing bodies — that is the honest substitute for a construction pipeline, and any promoter working here should be able to place a scheme on it in one sentence.
| Cover periods | Article 17 of Ley 38/1999 sets ten years for structural damage, three years for habitability defects and one year for finishing work. 2026-08-26 |
|---|---|
| When the guarantee starts | The first additional provision of Ley 38/1999 requires advance payments to be guaranteed from the moment the building licence is obtained. 2026-08-26 |
| How the cover is arranged | Ley 20/2015 amended the building law to allow a financial guarantee as an alternative, ending the previous collective-policy arrangement. 2026-08-26 |
| Licensing authority | Works inside the quarter are licensed by the Ayuntamiento de Marbella, which publishes its own instruction on processing licencia de obra applications. 2026-08-26 |
How this runs, step by step
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Step 1
Ask which walls are being kept
Specific to Marbella
In a conversion the answer decides everything downstream: the acoustics between units, the position of the stair, whether a lift is possible, and how much of the building counts as new work. Ask for the demolition drawing alongside the sales plan. A promoter who cannot produce one has not yet designed the scheme they are selling you.
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Step 2
Check the heritage authorisation date
Specific to Marbella
Where a building affects a declared monument or its surroundings, express authorisation is required before works, and it precedes the municipal licence rather than accompanying it. Ask for the date and the reference. This is the step most likely to move a delivery date in this quarter, and it is the one least likely to appear in a brochure.
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Step 3
Insist on the guarantee from licence
Under the first additional provision of Ley 38/1999, a promoter taking money in advance must guarantee its return, by insurance or bank guarantee, from the moment the building licence is obtained. Ley 20/2015 rewrote how that cover is arranged, replacing the old collective-policy arrangement with a financial guarantee. No guarantee document, no payment.
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Step 4
Read the division into the deed
Specific to Marbella
A conversion creates several dwellings where one existed, and those units only exist legally once the promoter executes and registers the declaration of new work and horizontal division. Ask when that will be done and what quota of the building your unit will carry, because that quota, not your floor area, sets your share of every future communal cost.
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Step 5
Condition completion on the LPO
Specific to Marbella
The licencia de primera ocupación is the municipal certificate that the finished building matches what was licensed and may be occupied. Utilities and the registration of your unit both wait on it. Write it into the contract as a condition of completion. On a conversion the LPO is granted for the converted building as a whole, so one unit's delay is everybody's delay.
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Step 6
Know your three cover periods
Article 17 of Ley 38/1999 sets three windows: ten years for damage to structural elements, three years for defects that break habitability, and one year for finishes, for which the constructor answers. On a conversion the interesting question is how much of what you are buying counts as structural new work, so ask which elements the ten-year cover actually attaches to.
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A conversion bought before completion costs money in a different order from a resale house on the same lane. Instead of Andalucía's transfer tax you pay IVA on the price plus AJD on the deed, and both fall at completion rather than at reservation; before that come the staged payments, each of which must be guaranteed. Because the old town sits mid-table on the Marbella ladder, below Nueva Andalucía and above Elviria, and because the building already existed, the share of the total that is fabric rather than land is unusually high. Ask the promoter to separate the two lines.
GUIDE An indication of where this area sits, not a valuation of any particular home. Ask Paula for a figure you can act on.
Questions about this in Marbella Old Town
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Does an off-plan guarantee apply to a conversion here?
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Yes, where a promoter is taking money in advance for a dwelling that is not finished. The obligation attaches from the moment the building licence is obtained, and the cover may be an insurance policy or a bank guarantee since the law was rewritten in 2015. The practical point is that a conversion sold room by room with no licence in hand is outside that protection entirely, which is why the licence number is the first thing to ask for and the deposit the last thing to hand over.
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How much of a converted flat counts as new work?
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Less than the finish suggests, and that is the question worth asking before signing. In a conversion the masonry, and sometimes the party walls and the foundations, are the original building; the floors, roof, services and internal layout are usually new. Because the ten-year cover in the building law attaches to structural elements, the answer decides what is actually guaranteed for a decade and what is not. Ask for it element by element, in writing, and attach the answer to the contract.
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Can a promoter add a floor to a protected building?
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Only with express prior authorisation, and never on the strength of the municipal licence alone. Where the building affects a declared monument or the surroundings covered by that declaration, the heritage authority decides first and the town hall second. Buyers are sometimes shown a roof-level unit that exists in a rendering and not in a licence. The test is simple: ask for the authorisation reference and its date, and treat anything else as a proposal rather than a plan.
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