Building a house in Valencia Spain 2020/2021

First, I think that renting is always better than buying. Especially in Spain, where you pay 10-12% buyers fee. So if the rent is 4% – so you can rent for 3 years just of the buyers fee. Secondly your family situation changes and you have more flexibility renting. And thirdly changing places is fun.

The reason why we have started building a house in Valencia, Spain is that we wanted a house next to kids school and there was nothing decent to rent. And the purchase prices seemed ridiculous of the houses that we liked.

So the first thing of building a house – choosing a location was obvious and those are places where most best schools in Valencia are:

Torre Conill – lots of new houses. Some plots on the golf course. No trees.
Mas Camarena – no plots available at a market price. At the time there were only one plot at 600 euros per squaremeter.
Campolivar – big plots (that can not be devided) the plot prices start at 400k
La Canada – this is the one we have chosen. At a given time you could buy 500 square meters at around 250 euros per square meter

Architects

The architects qoute different prices from 7.000 to 20.000 for a single family house. The price is proportional to the english level. I an recommend this company.

Building permits

Building permits take approximately 8 months – but there is new law that lets outsource the work townhall to private company. With up to 2k euros you can get a building permit in less than 3 months.

Construction

There are basically two ways to proceed with construction:

A. hire a general contactor. Advantages are that you do nothing, get guarantees. On the other hand you pay 8-20% on this. And as you are paying % – the contractor has incentive to spend more.

B. Hire individual companies. You save money. You have a lot of work

We have chosen hiring 11 companies to do: