Frequently Asked Questions about Property Deposit Reclaim (PDR)

When you are happy to proceed and we are confident in your case and have assessed all avenues thoroughly, we will send you our engagement letter, a power of attorney which means our legal team will work on your claim and can attend court of your behalf. From then on we will deal with everything for you whilst updating you on the way at frequent intervals.

Most cases take from 12-18 months to complete. However, depending on the developer, bank, type of documentation you have and other variables, some cases could take a bit longer. A usual claim will develop as following:
1. We obtain the necessary documentation from you and we try to reach an out-of-court agreement with the bank.

2. In most cases, we need to confirm your payments to the developer via the bankruptcy administration (This process is the slowest as we can’t do anything until payments have been confirmed).
3. Once confirmed, we contact the bank to pay, negotiate or get a settlement.
4. If the bank doesn’t reply or their response is not satisfactory, we will issue a claim and start the judicial process.
5. Now that your claim is in the court system (quite lengthy sometimes), it’s a waiting game but eventually, we will help you get your money back.

Please be aware that should you not be able to provide us with a copy or the original contract signed with both Developer and Bank and any proof of payments made to both Developer and Bank, we will have to get those documents from the Developer by appealing to the meeting of creditors. In these cases, your claim could be delayed as we won’t be able to star legal proceedings until we get those documents.

The basis for the claim for a refund of a deposit for an off-plan property in Spain has been established by a series of Spanish Supreme Court cases, the latest of these was December 2015, which have established the following:

• A developer is legally required to provide a Bank Guarantee to the buyer where the property is not yet finished and where no Licence of First Occupation (LFO) has been obtained.
• The full amount of money paid prior to completion of the Spanish Property is guaranteed, not just the amount set out in the guarantee, even if this right appears to have been waived by the buyer.
• It is the developer’s obligation (not the buyer’s) to ensure that deposit funds are placed in a special account. The fact that the developer did not do this does not affect the buyer’s rights to a refund of deposits paid.
• Even if the developer did not comply with their legal obligation to give the buyer a bank guarantee, the bank with whom the funds were held is still jointly responsible for refunding this money to the buyer because the bank had a duty to ensure that the developer had complied with its legal obligations.
• The bank (or insurer who issued the guarantee) are jointly and severally liable which means that the buyer can sue the bank or the insurance company without having to first sue the developer.
• The banks can be sued regardless of whether there was a bank guarantee in place or not.

No, we can't guarantee you a 100% chance of success. What we can tell you is that, even though no claim can have a 100% success rate, Off-Plan Property claims are accepted in a very high percentage and, unless your case is very specific, we are very likely to win your claim. Anyway, remember that we operate under a policy "no win, no fee" so, in the remote case that we lost, you would not pay our fees.

If you have lost money when buying off plan property in Spain, Legalbono can help you.

We will be able to talk you through the process and arrange for a free assessment of your claim with no obligation, to help you to get a refund of the money you have lost in relation to Spanish property deposits on a ‘No Win No Fee’ basis.

You can only claim for a refund once, so we advise to choose our expertise to get it done for you.

All consumers can put a claim against the bank on the basis that they have wanted to purchase a home and are frustrated because it has not been finished or has not been delivered within the expected timeframe. It is good that in this claim, along with the documentation that supports the amounts advanced, you have an expert lawyer working with you to win it.

If we win your claim, the bank must return you all the money invested plus its corresponding legal interests to count from the moment you made the payment.

Our lawyers are aware that with these judgments of the Supreme Court has opened another front for the bank "the chances of recovering the money are very high, if the documentation that supports the amounts advanced and contract are provided".

In this case, the banks are responsible for an irregularity committed by a third party "in many cases, the developer when given different amounts on account should have constituted an endorsement of a solvent entity to support any delay in construction. By failing to do so, he has left you, the helpless consumer, unable to recover that money and the bank is jointly responsible for a foreign business".

The debate is open to discuss whether the term is one year, five, with the new regulations approved in 2016 or fifteen by Law 57/68. It is very possible that the Supreme Court has to pronounce on this issue shortly to clarify it "What is important is to claim the bank as soon as possible, because any claim interrupts the prescription".

It is possible that the bank says that the consumer did not have any contract and will argue the non-contractual liability but once you send your documents to our expert team, we can give you a free viability study before making any decision.

When contacting potential Deposit Reclaim clients too many have misplaced key pieces of information and some don’t even have paperwork at all. Without the correct documentation being packaged in a claim then your case will have little chance of success.

Here are the documents we need from you:

• Contracts signed with both Developer and Bank.
• Any Payments made to both Developer and Bank.
• Advertising brochures that the bank gave you.
• Bank Statements.
• Personalized product Information sheet (so called FIPER).
• Previous claim, if any.