Special Acquisitions

Some briefs cannot be searched for, only pursued. A buyer knows the building they want, or knows the shape of it precisely enough that there are four of them in the country. Nothing is listed, nothing is coming up, and the ordinary machinery of the market has nothing to offer.

That is this category. It is slower than the others and it is the one most likely to end in nothing. What it offers when it does work is a purchase with no competing bid, because there was never a market.

Approaching an owner who is not selling

The work is finding out who actually owns a building — which in Portugal means the land registry rather than the name on the gate — and then making an approach that is worth answering. An approach that reads as speculative gets treated as speculative. One that arrives with a named buyer, a reason, a price range and a timescale is a different proposition and deserves a considered reply, which is usually what it gets.

Where the answer is no, it is worth asking when it might not be. A no this year is not a no in principle, and circumstances change.

What is particular about the unusual ones

• Somebody else may have the right to buy it instead of you. The State, the region and the council hold rights of pre-emption over property that is classified, in the course of being classified, or standing in the protection zone around something classified — a right to step into an agreed sale on the same terms you negotiated. Councils hold the same right over anything inside an urban regeneration area, which is the version most buyers actually meet, and those areas cover a great deal of central Lisbon and Porto. The window to exercise it is short and it runs at the end, so it is established at the start rather than discovered at the deed.
• A ruin is a planning question, not a building question. Whether something can be rebuilt depends on what the municipal plan permits and on what is legally still there. Walls standing is not the same as a building existing.
• Estates and quintas are usually several titles. An estate that reads as one place is often a number of registered parcels with different classifications, and occasionally one of them belongs to a cousin. That is found early or it is found at the worst moment.
• Agricultural land is restricted land. The same national agricultural and ecological reserves that govern plots govern the fields attached to a house, and they affect what the whole thing is worth.

What we do

We take the brief seriously enough to tell you when it is not achievable. Most of this work is establishing whether a thing is possible at all, and we would rather reach a clear no quickly than an unclear one slowly.