You are buying off-plan in a country you are not in
Buying off-plan in a country you are not in means the developer is your only source of information, unless you arrange otherwise.
When the property is being built in a country you are not in, almost everything you learn about it comes from the party selling it to you. That material is not necessarily dishonest, but it is chosen, and it cannot be measured against your contract or against itself. Arranging your own dated record of the site is what closes that gap.
Distance changes which risks matter
A buyer in the same city drives past the site. They notice when nothing has changed for two months, and they notice it early enough for the observation to be worth something.
At distance that feedback loop does not exist. What arrives instead is a selection: the photographs the developer chose, from the angles they chose, on the dates they chose to send them. None of it is dishonest and none of it is evidence.
The second thing distance changes is who signs. Acceptance is frequently handled by a representative under power of attorney, which means somebody else is making a decision with contractual force on your behalf. They should be working from a written record.
What the report contains at this point
The report is the same product at every stage of a purchase, and it costs the same. What changes is what it is filled with, and on a property still under construction abroad the report leads with the list below.
- Photographs carrying the day they were taken
- A written note on what they show, in your language
- What the contract says should be there by now, set against what was found
- A completion range, where the building allows one to be given
What to set up before the first instalment
Useful whether or not you order anything from us. If the developer answers all of it in writing, you have what you needed and we are not required.
- Read the payment schedule before anything else in the contract. Whether payments follow stages or calendar dates decides how much say you have if the build falls behind.
- Find the specification annex and keep it. It is the document the finished property will be measured against.
- Decide who will hold power of attorney at handover, and on what basis they will decide to sign.
- Set an interval for reports that matches your payment schedule, so a report lands before each invoice rather than after it.
Buying at distance removes the ordinary feedback of driving past the site, and what fills the space is material the seller selected. A record taken on dates you set, read against the payment clauses and the specification annex, gives you the one thing developer photographs cannot: something comparable, in hand before the next instalment.
Last checked
Questions on this
- Can I just ask the developer for more photographs?
- You can, and you should. It costs nothing and the response tells you something either way. What it does not give you is a comparable record: photographs chosen by the seller, from varying angles, on varying dates, cannot be measured against each other.
- What if the site will not let your specialist in?
- Access is arranged with your authorisation before the visit, not at the gate. If we are refused on the day we photograph and date the perimeter and every accessible elevation, and the report comes out on time on what could be obtained — that record, the permits and approvals, and your payment position against your contract. The refusal is in it, dated, and your next visit stays on the schedule.
- How often is worth it?
- Match the interval to your payment schedule rather than to the calendar. A report that arrives two weeks after an instalment was paid is history; the same report two weeks before it is a decision.