New build & off-plan

An off-plan reservation buys a promise with a date on it. Until the escritura pública is signed you hold a contractual right against a promoter rather than a home, and the strength of that right is the entire subject. Ley 38/1999, the Ley de Ordenación de la Edificación, sets out who the parties to a building are and what each one answers for: the promotor who commissions and sells, the constructor who builds, the dirección facultativa who designs and certifies the work. Which of them your contract actually names, and which of them carries which liability, is the first thing a lawyer establishes and the last thing a brochure explains.

The building licence is the trigger, and it is worth being exact about why. Under the first additional provision of Ley 38/1999, in the wording Ley 20/2015 gave it, a promoter who takes money on account must guarantee its return with legal interest desde la obtención de la licencia de edificación — from the obtaining of the building licence — through an insurance policy or a bank guarantee issued by an authorised institution. A scheme collecting deposits before it holds that licence is therefore not yet covered by the regime it will later point at. The useful question is when the licence issued, not whether it is expected.

The same provision requires those sums to reach the promoter through a credit institution and to sit in a cuenta especial, separated from every other fund the company holds and drawn only for the works. Cover is arranged as una póliza de seguro individual por cada adquirente — an individual policy for each buyer — which is why a general assurance that the developer is insured proves nothing at all about your own position. The document worth asking for is the one carrying your name, your unit and your amounts. If it has not been issued yet, the payment schedule has run ahead of the protection.

How the instalments are spread is contract, not statute. Nothing obliges a promoter to tie payments to certified building progress rather than to dates fixed when the brochure was printed, which means the schedule is negotiable and is usually negotiated by whoever thinks to ask. A progress-linked schedule has one plain advantage: when the site stops, the next payment stops with it. Dates alone keep drawing money out of a buyer while nothing goes into the ground. The private contract is also where the delivery window, the consequence of missing it, and the condition that completion waits for the occupation certificate are either written down or quietly left out.

Delivery is a sequence of documents rather than a handover of keys. The works are certified as finished, the building is declared and, where units are sold separately, divided; the municipality then confirms that what stands matches what it permitted, and that confirmation is what allows utilities to be contracted definitively in an owner’s own name instead of running on the builder’s site supply. Ley 38/1999 also requires the Libro del Edificio to be handed to the people who will use the building — the project as built, the reception record, who did what, and the maintenance instructions — while Real Decreto 390/2021 puts the energy certificate on the promoter and requires it to reach the buyer.

One distinction decides whether any of this applies to you. The regime above binds a promotor selling a dwelling it is building. A private owner selling a flat they have gutted and re-fitted is not a promotor, so there is no cuenta especial, no aval and no statutory structural cover arranged around your payment: the deposit is arras under the Código Civil and the recourse is ordinary contract law. Both transactions can be sound. They are not the same transaction, and a listing that calls a mid-reform resale new has described the finish rather than the legal position. Establish which one you are in before the deposit leaves.

Everything set out above is national. The guarantee regime, the liability clocks, the handover documents and the contract law behind a deposit read the same in every province, and none of them softens because a development is small or a promoter is likeable. The tax structure is partly national and partly regional: IVA is a state tax, AJD is set by the Junta de Andalucía. Read that far and an off-plan purchase looks uniform along the whole coast — which is exactly where most explanations stop, and exactly where the part that decides your timetable begins.

The municipal layer is where off-plan purchases genuinely differ from one another. The Ayuntamiento issues the building licence and signs off the occupation of the finished block. It applies its own general plan, which decides what may be built, at what density and on which land. It sets the property-tax rate and collects the municipal charge on the increase in land value. Andalucía’s planning framework sits above all of that in Ley 7/2021, the LISTA, but the file, the queue and the officer handling it are local. Two comparable buildings a boundary apart can run on very different timetables under one statute.

The other local fact is the one no national page can carry: what is actually being built, by whom, and on which land. That changes by the month and by the municipality, and it is worth checking before anything else written here. The area pages listed below are where it is written down — each one names the municipality, the planning position and the development activity that could be verified at the time of writing. Read this page for the frame. Read the page for the municipality you are actually buying in for everything the frame does not settle.