Lots of Britons and foreigners from other countries purchased Spanish off-plan properties during the last decade. In order to do so, they had to make large deposits in advance. However, the financial crisis came along and many developers went out of business, leaving the buyers without their promised property, not reimbursing their deposits.
Spanish Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that banks had to guarantee your deposits by law, keeping such amounts in a secure and independent bank account. Now, those affected can claim against the bank and get their money back plus legal interest of 4.5% per annum.
As we have stated previously, your deposit had to be guaranteed by law, either through bank insurance or bank guarantee. We recommend you to claim if:
Now you’re closer to getting your money back. Our advice is to start your claim as soon as possible.
We have set up this brief online form to get to know your case. You can fill it out from your computer or smartphone at any time. You just have to:
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:
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.
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: