Our search for a house in Spain started about 3 years ago. After a long search on the internet, we found some properties in the Catral area that appealed to us. We made an appointment with the estate agent and my husband left on a 3-day reconnaissance trip. After the first day, our enthusiasm was already much less. The estate agent had forgotten to mention that most houses in Catral are not licensed. It was one of the sellers who asked if the agent had informed us about the situation in Catral. He would tell us afterwards, he said. The trust was gone.

After this unpleasant experience, we did not lose heart and continued our search on the internet. We found people from Oostkamp who rented out a holiday home in El Chaparral Torrevieja. We rented that house with the intention of exploring the region and looking for houses that we had seen for sale on the internet or not.

We visited many houses but without result every time. It was not easy to communicate our wishes...

Buying a second stay abroad is not a simple job that will bring you to a successful conclusion in an instant. Most of the time you have already surfed a dothead on the internet, you have already wandered off a number of stock exchanges where you are either accused by intrusive sellers, or radically ignored by other buyers who feel their elbows that you are not an interesting "victim".

If you then take the plane - a bit of good luck - to some sunny destination, hoping that expert guidance by a few real estate agents will deliver you your dream house in no time, you may be faced with less pleasant surprises.

Some brokers have only just met you or they are asking when you could sign, others are putting pressure on you to get rid of a contract, without worrying much about your budget, your preference of location, the sunny side or shadow side, for a large or small project ... If anything is drawn, the rest is incidental or simply unimportant (for them). Cowboys can be...

A word of thanks to Rita,

For some years now, we have been planning to buy a house in Spain in order to settle down on one of the Spanish Costa's once we reach the retirement age.

Our trajectory is one like so many others, first we looked around on several real estate internet sites in Spain, visited the second-home fair, made a viewing trip, etc...

On the first viewing trip, we initially went with three different estate agents in order to find the "best" one.

We made an appointment with them for a second and more "targeted" viewing trip.

Beforehand, we independently looked up the location of the houses. During one of our trips, we happened to run into Rita. We recognised her from the second-home exhibition. We chatted and Rita said she was always at our service, if necessary.

More coincidence. The estate agent (from a large and popular estate agency) with whom we were supposed to visit the houses, cancelled all our appointments the...

Hello Rita, 

-It feels so good to be able to give credit to Rita of Ritamarproperties for finding our dream home after some serious disappointments with other real estate agents.

After eight years of searching we decided to give Spain another chance and went to the fair "Second Home Expo" in Antwerp in May 17.

We found out that, apart from a handshake, we did not really get a hearing from the bigger players because my vision and that of my husband were a bit different and the conclusion from previous years, after we had seen the umpteenth property that did not meet our wishes and therefore did not go along with the push stories after we had been in Spain, was that we would never find something in Spain. We belonged to the category of "not easy to turn around" and apart from a polite greeting, you didn't get a second look.

Fortunately for us, this attitude brought us into contact with other, albeit less well-known estate agents. One of...