We had an enquiry not long ago saying someone had been reading our website about a proposed gift or donation of a property in Spain.
This is fairly common in this region as relatively inexpensive at the moment and a good time to do it but this client had a slightly different issue.
She explained that her parents own a property jointly in La Zenia in our region of Alicante, Valencia. They wish to transfer the property to her as a gift, with the approx. value of the property being about 95,000€.
They are all UK passport holders and non residents of Spain. She actually works in Malaysia.
She explained that a year or two ago she and her mother put in place Lasting Powers of Attorney to cover both health/welfare and financial affairs on behalf of her father who sadly has Alzheimers.
She and her mother wanted us to confirm if the gift of the property under Spanish law would be possible given the above circumstances.
We were able to advise the client that, yes, it is possble to arrange the gift of the property under Spanish law in these circumstances and we can help.
Costs
To quote the costs we would need a scanned copy of the deeds and a suma (council tax) bill for the property showing the catastral value. She is fortunate though that the current tax free allowance in this area is 100,000€ per child, so we would not expect there to be gift tax.
Documents required
The documents we would need for the transaction will be the Lasting Powers of Attorney (which should be registered and stamped by the Office of the Public Guardian in the UK), with a Hague Apostille for international use from the foreign office in the UK, the father and mother’s passport copies and NIES,
a power of attorney from her mother to our solicitor (which we ccould arrange), and her passport and NIE
(we can help with this), as she is receiving an inheritance, and her power of attorney (in this case, we would email a draft to Singapore with instructions).
The transaction should not take more than a couple of months to complete. If you have any queries on a similar issue please contact us.