Signing for a house that is not built yet

A house bought before it is built is bought as a description. There is a plot, a set of drawings, a written specification and a price, and the house is a promise about how the first three become a building. Nothing can be inspected yet, so everything has to be read, and reading is easy to postpone.

What follows is the shape of the thing rather than the law of it: what applies to your purchase depends on the region, on the seller and on the paper in front of you. Take every question here to your own lawyer, while the wording can still change.

What the signature fixes

Read the contract twice. Once for what it treats as settled, and once for what it treats as adjustable. The adjustable part is where to slow down, because a clause that allows movement is only as even-handed as its wording.

Surface is the plainest example. A finished house rarely measures exactly what the drawing said, and a contract may allow a margin between the two. Find out whether yours does, how wide it is, whether it runs in both directions, and what happens to the price if the house comes in under the drawing. Establish, too, which measure the figures use: floor area can be stated in more than one way, and two documents can quote the same house at two sizes without either being wrong.

Then the date. A completion date can be written as a date, as an estimate, or as a period that begins when something else happens: a licence, a payment, the start of works. Only one of those is a date. Ask which one you are signing, what stops the clock, and what follows if it runs out. Where a clause names causes that earn an extension, read that list slowly: some are outside anyone's control, others are the ordinary friction of building.

Then the seller: the entity named in the contract rather than the name on the brochure, and whoever carries the obligations once the development is finished and sold. Not always the same, and easier to have answered now than established later.

Where the house is described

With nothing to point at, the description does all the work. Which documents describe the house is a question of what the contract annexes; the candidates are the drawings and the written specification. A brochure is not one of them, and neither is a render, usually made before many of the decisions are taken and not always brought back into line afterwards. It shows an intention, and furniture that may not be part of the sale.

So ask which documents are annexed, whether they carry a version date, and whether both parties have initialled them. Then settle what happens when two of them disagree, because they can. An order of precedence is easier to agree now than in the middle of an argument you cannot yet see.

Spend an evening on the specification itself. In a finished house you can go and look at the tap; here the words are the tap. Everything that will be invisible when the work is done, behind the plaster and under the terrace, exists only as text, and that text is either specific or it is not.

When something has to change

Something usually does. Changes come from two directions: the ones you want, and the ones the build turns out to need. A product is discontinued; a detail that worked on paper fails where two walls meet.

What matters is a procedure rather than goodwill: how a change is proposed, priced, approved and recorded. Insist that each one arrives in writing before the work is done, carrying its price and its effect on the date. A change agreed on the telephone can be remembered differently when the invoice arrives.

Ask how the price is arrived at, against rates fixed in the contract or case by case, and whether a credit for something removed is calculated like a charge for something added. And name, in advance, who may approve a change while you are away, because if nobody is named, somebody will decide anyway.

The other half is timing. Every choice has a point after which it becomes rework: a tile format once the substrate is built, a socket once the wall is plastered, a shower position once the pipes are chased. Ask for the decisions in the order they close, and for the specification to be reissued and dated each time rather than amended by a trail of email.

Payments and handover

Payments during construction are the part to be slowest about. Ask what triggers each one: a calendar date, or a stage of work certified by somebody who has been to the site. The difference is whether you are funding progress or a programme.

Then what protects the money once it has left you. Arrangements of that kind exist, and they are not all alike. Whether one applies to your purchase, who issues it, when you receive the document, what it covers and which events let you call on it are five separate questions. Ask to see a specimen before you pay anything. A vague answer is itself an answer.

Handover and the deed are not necessarily the same event. Ask which comes first, what you may withhold if the house is not ready, and what has to be in place before it can be occupied and the water and power connected. Names and requirements vary across Spain, so ask which apply here and who obtains each.

Then the handover itself, a day with its own paperwork. How defects are recorded, who signs the list, what period follows for putting them right, whether taking the keys is treated as accepting the house. Settle those before the day rather than on it. What cover exists afterwards, how long it runs and who carries it is not uniform either, and belongs with your lawyer rather than a sales conversation.

Ask, too, for a list of what arrives with the keys: as-built drawings, equipment manuals, maintenance instructions for anything with a filter or a pump, certificates, a contact for each installer. Ask while the contract is still being negotiated.

None of this requires suspicion. Every question here has an answer, and a seller willing to put the answers in writing before the first payment has told you something about how the build will be run. We send the specification and the change procedure out together, before anything is signed. It is a cheaper conversation in an empty room than on a half-built staircase.