Hi there,
In today’s post I tell you how the odyssey of looking for a house to invest in continues.
Here is the first part:
Casa o chalet en venta en Lugar Cerdedelo, 44, Laza
Initially we saw that this house belonged to a real estate agency, and they had some very bad photos; moreover, they were incomplete. We contacted them to ask for the missing photos and they were very rude. So, we immediately discarded it.
Then this house appeared again but advertised by the owner. We contacted her and at first, she was very nice.
The house was 2h15 from Porto. We arrived and the lady started to tell us about the irregularities of the house. They were houses that ADIF had made for their employees in the 60s.
The house had a lot of work to do, there was no phone line, no network, and no signal to our cell phones.
When I told her to take pictures of the whole house in order to inventory the furniture in case we wanted to move forward with the purchase, she told us that she was selling the house empty.
We told her that the house was advertised as furnished and she replied that something would remain, but she didn’t know what.
When we got back to our house in Porto, we started to investigate the situation of the house in the land registry and we saw that the garage was illegal.
We sent her a message so that she could clarify this, send us the list of the furniture that she would leave in the house and send us the energy certificate.
The answer was that she did not have an energy certificate, and she was not going to get it until the house was reserved, that “she was selling an empty house and the furniture was hers”, and that she had some documents from the garage, but she did not feel like looking for them.
So, we also discarded this house because the lady thought she was doing us a favor by selling us her house.
Moradia independente à venda , Travassô
After I decided to give the houses in Portugal a second chance, I told this friend who was a real estate agent to manage all the properties I was interested in.
In the end it was a waste of time because out of 14 houses that I passed on to her, she only managed to arrange viewings for 2 houses; coincidentally, the only 2 houses that were from her agency. Therefore, I started again to manage my own things independently since she was only interested in the properties of her agency.
So, this was the first house I visited as the realtor was very competent and answered all my questions.
The village in which the house was located was most spectacular, but the house was a complete disappointment.
The windows were small and lacked natural light.
The doors did not insulate well against the cold and to top it all off, they had made ventilation holes in them so that even more cold came in.
The stove and water heater ran on gas and then we realized that it was not even natural gas / city gas but had two bottles in the basement. This was the thing that threw me off the house the most. It makes no sense that a completely renovated house would still function as an old house.
The nicest thing about this property which was the view of the outside area was not visible from inside the house. The windows in the hallway were very small and it was as if you had no view. The rooms faced the street.
Something very absurd is that the house had no access to what the outside area was. You had to go out, turn around and enter through the gate to access the uncovered area of the house.
Lastly, the house had two windowless rooms that were useless, and your couldn’t give any use to the downstairs because the ceiling was too low and there was no heating system.
Chalet pareado en venta en calle do Arrabaldo, 9. Celanova
This house was in a village relatively close to Ourense.
We had kept it for a long time and as after months we still hadn’t found anything worthwhile, we decided to give it a try.
It looked good in the photos, although it gave the impression that it was all stairs.
The tour starts with a wooden entrance door to the house that was rotten from moisture and with giant spiders.
The kitchen was tiny and filthy. In the dishwasher were dirty dishes from who knows how many years ago.
Both bathrooms were filthy, but on an inhuman level. The showers had the ceiling so low that Diego couldn’t fit in, and all the floor tiles were peeling.
The parts under the cabinets were also rotten from the damp.
There was an intermediate floor with a supposed work area that you couldn’t even enter because the ceiling was too low.
It should be noted that in both rooms there was no room for the bed. It would be wedged in with no room to walk around.
Since the window frames were made of wood, they were also rotten from the humidity.
We left that house disappointed and regretting the 4-hour drive that the visit to the house had cost us.
The worst part was that the owner came by, and we got caught between him and the real estate agent talking nonsense and pretending to be nice.
Casa de aldeia à venda na rua da Escola Velha, 1
This house had very nice views of the river. It looked great in the pictures and the owner of the house answered all my questions without any problems. The house was about an hour and a half from Porto.
We visited the house at the end of November 2024 and although it was the best we had seen so far, I was not convinced to spend 190,000 euros.
Overall, the house was nice, and the renovation work was much better and with better finishes than anything we had seen so far, but it had many details that I did not like.
First of all, the installation of the washing machine was poorly done and they had even put the tube with adhesive tape, none of the bathrooms had all tiled walls, the house had no telecommunications installation, the master bedroom was the worst because the closet was very small and the bathroom was minimal; in addition, it was placed behind the bed, without door and half of the wall was glass.
In other words, the bathroom in the suite was completely useless.
The walls were made of plasterboard and the floor above was wooden, which we didn’t want for anything in the world after the experience we had had with our house. Also, in one of the rooms it looked like they had run out of varnish, and the wood was bare.
There was also no space or facility to put the dryer in.
Casa o chalet en venta en Lugar Pousada, 39, Maside
https://www.fotocasa.es/es/comprar/vivienda/maside/calefaccion/177602483/d?from=list
It was two hours from Porto and was in an ideal area for tourist rentals as it was close to lakes, rivers and many hiking trails.
The house supposedly gave around 12,000 euros of annual income from tourist rentals.
The first thing I noticed upon entering was that it did not smell good, and several rooms smelled musty. The ceilings were very low, and Diego could hardly fit in the house.
In general, it was a bit disgusting because of the smell and how dirty it was, typical of a poorly maintained tourist rental place.
The bathrooms were poorly finished and neglected. The ceilings also had little pieces that looked like they were going to fall.
We couldn’t see where the washing machine was because it was locked, and the realtor was clueless about most things we asked.
This house was a resounding no.
From this point on, we decided not to visit any more houses because it was a waste of time. In November 2024 we started looking for developable land on which we could put a prefabricated house.
Although the process was not going to be as fast as buying a ready-made house, we thought it was going to be cheaper.
The story goes on, will we get a house that fits what we need? Maybe we will.