My wife and I never imagined it would be this hard to find a modest, older rural house on couple of hectares of land; the real estate industry here in Argentina is very primitive and it has become a real pain in the azz to locate our future home, something that should have been transparent and straight forward at this day and age, especially considering that Argentina is talking about opening up to the world now.
Generally we would avoid exposing our personal life experiences to the public but considering the magnitude of the problem, we believe it's important to share our story with the online community so that all those potential expats who dream of a beautiful property in Argentina can be more prepared and less naive about the process.
Since mid-2015 we began searching for our dream rural property online, using websites like mercado libre, alamaula, buscadorprop, agroads, etc.. and what we discovered is that many of the listings are fake and many others have distorted or hidden information which really defeats the purpose of listing anything online, it's unreliable. Also under the "dueno" category we found many realtors pretending to be the owners or relatives of owners until the very last moment when the conversation turns to putting together a sales agreement through the realtor's office, so now we avoid them like fire, here are the reasons:
First of all, most realtors (this is not an exaggeration) here in Argentina are not responsive and are very arrogant, they think they are doing you a favor by paying any attention to you. We were shocked to not only not receive phone calls back when we were anxious to learn about the newly-found listing but to also punctually arrive at their office for pre-arranged appointment and then wait for an entire hour until they were available to speak with us, this type of customer service would be unheard of anywhere in north america.
But those things are just annoyances and we learned to accept them as part of the Argentine culture, what's really troubling though is the fact that they lie about the legal status of the documents on properties that they want to "dump fast". When we ask them if the title is complete, they say "yes sure", "titulos perfectos" they add, but then after wasting a couple of weeks of back-and-forth phone conversations and taking time off work to visit the property it turns out that the property does not have a proper "escritura" or that it was an inheritance and that we would be subjected to potential lawsuit from the relatives of the deceased parents if we buy it.
Many properties turn out to be under the category of "sucession" but with "permiso de occupacion" with no real ownership and no re-sale potential, or sometimes there is some legal "poder" living in Spain that cannot come and sign but don't worry, you can still go ahead and pay us your life-savings, just stop expecting to own a legal title because it's optional (that's what they want you to believe), in other words, you can literally buy a property and go live there without even being the owner of that property and then once you build yourself a house you can expect to be kicked out by the original title holder, but they won't tell you that.
One classic problem with documentation, at least here in Buenos Aires province, is the civil code change in 2015 that mandates every ownership transfer to include the plans of the house in the escritura, something that was not mandatory in the past when many people built their homes illegally without any architectural designs or drawings, so now that they want to sell their 2 hectare hobby farm with an old, poorly build (no foundation!) collapsing house, they expect the buyer to pay for new plans on a house that will most likely be demolished after the purchase.
Since when is it the buyer's problem that the seller has no money to make new plans?
With private property sellers we reduced our expectations drastically, we no longer want a half decent house with good paved acces, we are okay now with a s#$%^y rotten house with bad wiring, leaky pipes and overgrown garden somewhere on a dirt road away from civilization - as long as the papers are right and the owner is reasonable in regards to asking-price and straight forward about the existing problems, but even that proves to be difficult since the owners are doing their absolute best to hide as much as they can.
They lie about the age of the structure, construction details, volume of existing water on property, soil quality, access issues etc..
But why hide it if the buyer is likely to investigate anyways? And once they find you lied about one little thing, they won't trust you again. Is the Argentine buyer really that stupid that lying has become a normal way of convincing them into buying real estate?
Nobody wants to waste their money for nothing especially when speaking of hard earned savings. It's hard to understand the Argentine mind-set, often times they behave much like the realtors, acting like they are doing you a favorite by picking up their phone.
There are times when we just want to say: "Do you want to sell your property or not? Make up your mind sir." And maybe they are not in hurry to sell, after all, Argentine's aren't exactly motivated by new opportunities...
In north america the buyer is the one doing a favor by offering money in exchange for a property that is eager and ready to sell, apparently in Argentina the law of gravity does not work.
Is it a crime to want to know everything about the property? Yes I want to see the roof please because that will affect my offering price, and why is it unreasonable to make a lower offer if we see that your property is going to require back-breaking labor for the next ten years?
Negotiating is hard here but we are more patience now and taking it slow, knowing that rural real estate requires special attention and infinite caution. Now we know why so many people are buying apartments in "pozo" and empty lots, because it's headache-free and yet it should be infinitely easier to buy small rural hobby farm that urban people aren't interested in anyways, go figure...
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