If you are lucky enough to be in the position to be considering moving to Spain, you will want to know how to find a property for sale in Marbella!

Let’s get you pointed in the right direction for the best property for sale in Spain!

The main and most popular website you can start with is www.idealista.com which has the largest selection of property for sale in Spain

Idealista.com is the most popular and prominent of the Spanish real estate portals and currently leads the way with the biggest database of houses for sale in Spain. The Idealista.com website is available to translate into 16 different languages including English, Chinese, Dutch, German, and French.Idealista.com has head offices in Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, Milan, and Lisbon and is run by a vast team of property experts. The Idealista.com website and app provide a very confident, professional, and secure service with an excellent blog that is regularly updated with first-rate information on the Spanish property market.

The alternative and also known as best for finding private sellers of houses for sale in Spain is www.fotocasa.com

It comes in a close second to Idealista in terms of the number of houses in Spain you can choose from here.  Fotocasa.com is available to translate into three other languages apart from Spanish and these are English, German and Catalan.

Fotocasa is part of Adevinta group, a leading company for digital marketplaces which operates in ten countries around the world. Other popular Adevinta websites include Infojobs.net (employment), Coches.net and Motos.net (vehicles), and Milanuncios.com (the second-hand market).

There is a lot of very useful and easy-to-read information available on the Fotocasa.com portal in addition to its extensive Spanish properties catalogue.

This includes interactive maps, a mortgage calculator and comparison tool, and detailed image galleries, videos, and virtual tours.

A third alternative is a portal www.kyero.com

Kyero.com is another of the big Spanish property portals and the company makes an extra effort to try to help new foreign buyers happily buy a house in Spain by providing free downloadable moving to and buying property in Spain guides.

Kyero.com has sister websites operating in Italy, France, and Portugal. This company is highly successful and experienced in the property industry and a great choice for newbie foreign buyers.

The Kyero.com Spanish team is a friendly group of property experts who are readily available via the website to help you understand how much a house in Spain costs and what processes does are involved with buying property in Spain.

There are also clear FAQs and useful market data, property podcasts, and an affordability calculator that allow users to easily find the best houses for sale in Spain.

That said, scanning these three websites to explore the property market in Marbella are a great way to get started, specifically if you are familiar with the areas already and have decided for where your future home or investment should be located at.

A word of advice though, if you are seriously looking to buy my recommendation is to secure a professional real estate agent prior scheduling any visits ( and NO, I am not a real estate agent hence I am not trying to sell you a service!). You can save links of properties that seem interesting to you and go over these with your estate agent who can probably from an experience tell you a bit more about each property. Not only, a professional estate agent has also access to a vast property resale system ( also known as MLS or Multiple Listing Service). From there they are able to seek you the same properties that you have save or shown interest for – see if they are actually valid advert ( yes, it happens a lot that you come across an old listing that is no longer available and even fake listings just to get you to reach out and share your contact details to agents who are just starting out and who then try to sell you something else. It is a known „lead generation “technique over here! They can also pull out any other properties for sale in the same apartment buildings or close by. You can even share with your agent the name of the apartment complexes you have stayed in previously or have walked by and like, and they can look if any properties are for sale over there.

It doesn’t cost you anything to have a professional agent working on behalf of you, as the commission is paid by the seller. Once you understand how the system works here, it will also save you tons of time to have an agent do the work for you.

You will probably notice when scanning the websites, that many properties are listed several times on the same website. This happens as working exclusively with an agent (especially for bargain and low to mid-level properties) is not common. You might have your preferred agent or two that you work with, but quite often your property gets multiplied and the advert gets copied by other random agents you have never met before and hence your property for sale ad lives its own life online…now imagine you find a property online you like and you decide to reach out yourself , without a real-estate agent – what is very probable is that the agent on the other end who entered the property details has actually picked the information up from elsewhere. They also might have very limited information on the property or none. What they usually do in return then is log into the property resale system and find an original listing agent and try organizing a viewing. So, weather you knowingly wanted or not, you have a person now that you never met representing you as a client. Hence would have made sense to use a professional agent to look up the property on the resale system and identify the original listing agent and do the due diligence for you. I also personally had occasions when the agent I called to inquire about a property told me that the property is „complicated “and cannot be viewed as somebody lives in there etc. But later I found out that the original agent was not willing to share his commission with that particular agent as the latter did not have a company or way of invoicing for his services, so the property was actually available and very nice when I finally got there but I almost didn’t as the agent did not have the clients ( mine) bets interest in mind.

When getting into the process, you will notice many things that are not quite right at the property market in Marbella. Having unprofessional agents is a one, but also secondly they can give you bad advice or now advice at all.

I am happy to recommend any agents in the area so do feel free to reach out if you need a recommendation from me or ask around from  friends who have purchased here prior to pass recommendations for agents they have worked with previously, as it is important you have verified information about the agent before. That will make your life and buying process so much more pleasant! Happy shopping! 🙂