Buying a rural property in Argentina is HARD

[mc kenna]

i'm selling

 

[expat0tree]

@mc kenna

Please provide a link or send an email with more info to the following address: [email protected]

 

[steveinbsas]

@nikad

Thanks for the idea, what also makes us search challenging is the lack of connections. Would you recommend any reputable notaries in the rural Buenos Aires province? Do they not have websites with listings?

If the term ¨notary¨ is synonymous with the term ¨escribano/a¨ I doubt they would have websites with listings. That is the business of real estate agents and I seriously doubt an escribano with a good reputation would want to create that image. There may be a few escribanos who buy and sell properties on the side, but I imagine they would advertise them one at a time.

If I ever found one that owned a property I wanted to buy I would seriously consider using a different escribano for the escritura. Hopefully, the seller who is also an escribano would not be offended. If he is, that could be a warning sign.

I believe you will find most (if not all) notaries/escribanos in the ¨rural Buenos Aires province¨ are located in urban areas such as Bahia Blanca, Tandil, Mar Del Plata, etc. There was a ¨glitch¨ that delayed the closing for my house for ten months. Fortunately, the seller allowed me to move in while he resolved the problem. Although there were escribanos in Punta Alta we agreed to use one (with a better reputation) in Bahia Blanca.

I disagree about the safety issue with the rural properties. If your property is low-key, meaning if you don't have a fancy swimming pool and a huge casa and crazy truck and don't come across as a foreigner who is full of cash then there is no reason to be worried about safety.

I don´t mean to offend, but this is delusional...and extremely dangerous. This line of ¨reasoning (aka rationalization) will be detrimental to you and your wife´s safety and well being.

Did you not read the links I provided in my previous post, especially what happened to Mc kenna?

As a foreigner (aka newcomer) who is making improvements to an existing dwelling or building a house (however modest) you will come across as a foreigner who is not working and (relatively) full of cash.

Of course we'll have a proper fence and lots of trees for privacy, dogs and all that is necessary to be protected on a basic level. The main thing though is that we do not come across as wealthy foreigners anyways, we don't even dress up nice and our cellphones are old and cracked so nobody would think of us as a target.

People with fences, dogs, and trees, shabby clothes, and cracked phones still get robbed. Once in a while they do get killed. Earlier this year that´s what happened to a friend of one of my good friends who lives in Punta Alta. His friend lived in the rural area southeast of Punta Alta. He was robbed and shot in his home on a Saturday night. He was not a foreigner and he was not at all wealthy. His quinta was not within the urban zone and (obviously) not easy to protect.

Would I leave my wife alone? Sure why not. Do you really think that the entire rural Argentina is on a lock down? I don't think so, there are dangerous areas such as west of Greater Buenos Aires area, and other areas as well, but we are not going to live close to a villa where people deal drugs and shoot each other because of petty crimes, we want to live in a small community and know our immediate neighbors, that should be enough to guarantee basic safety...

The entire country is on a lock down...every night of the year. And we all live in houses and apartments with heavy duty shutters(aka anitrobo curtains) iron bars on their windows. I haven´t been in Capital Federal since late June of 2010. Have stores with street access stopped locking their doors during business hours?

Even here in the country, far from the nearest villa, nobody opens the doors to strangers, including me.

Even then, one of your immediate neighbors might be the one who tries to rob you.I know this from personal experience.

The nineteen year old wannabe gangsta was the wayward (uncontrollable) son of a very nice family who works on the quinta about 200 meters from my house.

He would have bashed my skull in with a four foot long wood 4 x 4 (cm) he grabbed form the front of my house if I had not been able to break it in half with a four foot long 5-8¨ metal rod I was holding as he ran toward me, swinging his¨weapon¨ in an obvious attempt to do great bodily harm.

In his twisted mind he had ¨good¨reason to kill me. I knew who he was. I knew his name. He introduced himself and asked me for drinking water just the day before. He said he was working at the brick factory across the street.

Fortunately, right after I broke his weapon and chased him into the street, a car with three young men who also live nearby drove past my house. I yelled to them and they chased after the thug (who they also knew). He got away but was arrested three days later.

He was sentenced to three years probation, but he hasn´t shown his face in this area since the incident. His family will have nothing to do with him.

...beyond that there is a greater risk of dying due to a car crush or poor health than robbery.

So far, the only real threat to my life in the eight and a half years I´ve lived here was the aforementioned attempted robbery and aggravated assault.

Nonetheless, I try to stay off the highway as much as possible and I rarely drive at night. Fortunately, the highway is well lit all the way to Punta Alta and a ¨well equipped¨ hospital is less than fifteen KM from my house.

 

[semigoodlookin]

Steve is right. It seems you are thinking of moving to Argentina not even knowing how dangerous it can be to simply walk down the street at night in any neighbourhood. Sure, living in the countryside will get you away from those normal inner city problems, but it will also put a nice target on you where the word "foreign money" will be posted above your house on any map.

It's not the Wild West, but you absolutely will have to take serious precautions to avoid problems.

 

[expat0tree]

@steveinbsas, @semigoodlookin

I've been living in Argentina since January of 2015. I used to take public transit to work at a plastic shop before I lost my job a couple of months ago, I worked with negros from the villa nearby (I live in the Great Buenos Aires area) who cannot read and write and who had dealt drugs and conducted robberies themselves, some of them were stabbed and shot at, I even visited one of them in the villa one time out of curiosity and could not believe the conditions (I asked other co-workers to accompany me because I was afraid to go there by myself).

You are right to say that in their mind they have all the best reasons in the world to attack westerners if they see the potential to steal but along with the hyped sense of alarm there should also be a healthy degree of perspective and understanding.

First of all, I do not live in a country club like you do Steven, that automatically makes you a target, almost any peronista in the villa would wish you were dead. Then claiming that the entire country is on lockdown is an outright exaggeration, I've looked at crime rates and compared numbers to discover that crime and homicide rates are actually very comparable to those of New City, for example, in some cases are much better, in the matter of fact Buenos Aires happens to be statistically safer than Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires is probably the worst in entire Argentina.

Yes, you can argue that stats under Cristina were not accurate but I've also spoken to locals and they all agree that it's much safer to live outside the rat's nest (GBA) where all the migrants are cut-throat desperate to make a buck by stealing if need be. So out in the campo, it should be better for as long as we do not stand out and do not do anything that would invite attention unless one is being unlucky, but that is not something that can be controlled regardless of where you are in the world.

Of course, there is always the risk of a robbery and the best way of preventing one is to be prepared and we can make sure that our future property is secured and that we know when to leave it and when to stay home, properly fenced with numerous guard dogs, a hunting rifle perhaps, etc but I still insist on the point that the city is more dangerous than the campo if you are going to think that police can somehow prevent all robberies, they help but not always.

I would like to share a good Christmas story with you:

About a year and a half ago I visited a friend in a good neighborhood here in GBA (clean safe neighborhood close to city center) and after dinner time I accompanied him in his car to pick up something that he needed at the gas station, it was dark already. As soon as we drove off the gas station there was this dark (with no headlights) car following us all the way back to my friend's house, we got in quickly through the remote-controlled gate and thought they went away but the car did another loop around the block and stopped right outside the gate with few men inside it, no lights, just radios could be heard, they were communicating to someone else, a friend told me that they were the police who conduct organized robberies so he told me to get in the house but I didn't quite get it so I stayed outside the side door looking at them through the reja, luckily they couldn't see me from behind the tree, one of them held a gun.

The wife and his daughters started to panic and called the police, once the suspicious muchachos heard them calling the police they simply drove away. Then the cops came, listened to the story, asked if everybody was okay and drove away, and it is not clear who those guys were, since then my friend got obsessed with making the fence taller with more spikes on it, he put double lock on the gate as well as the front door, he also cancelled his patrol security because somehow they were not present on the roads that night, so how can it be safer living inside a city?

His neighbor lady got robbed while she was inside a shower, a group of men came in, told her to dress up and not to do anything stupid, they then tied her up politely and cleaned the house as if they were a moving company in the middle of the day, without a hurry and very professionally, nobody got hurt and she ended up borrowing a plate for dinner because there was nothing left in her house, that's how great the police are. My point is that cities are more dangerous because everybody here is a target.

This happened because city people are naturally targeted by organized criminals who don't have to go far to conduct their business and by the poor who feel disadvantaged want to make an attempt if they can see you've got a nice casa behind a nice gate.

 

[mgni]

My wife and I never imagined it would be this hard to find a modest, older rural house on couple of hectares of land; the real estate industry here in Argentina is very primitive and it has become a real pain in the azz to locate our future home, something that should have been transparent and straight forward at this day and age, especially considering that Argentina is talking about opening up to the world now.

Generally we would avoid exposing our personal life experiences to the public but considering the magnitude of the problem, we believe it's important to share our story with the online community so that all those potential expats who dream of a beautiful property in Argentina can be more prepared and less naive about the process.


Since mid-2015 we began searching for our dream rural property online, using websites like mercado libre, alamaula, buscadorprop, agroads, etc.. and what we discovered is that many of the listings are fake and many others have distorted or hidden information which really defeats the purpose of listing anything online, it's unreliable. Also under the "dueno" category we found many realtors pretending to be the owners or relatives of owners until the very last moment when the conversation turns to putting together a sales agreement through the realtor's office, so now we avoid them like fire, here are the reasons:


First of all, most realtors (this is not an exaggeration) here in Argentina are not responsive and are very arrogant, they think they are doing you a favor by paying any attention to you. We were shocked to not only not receive phone calls back when we were anxious to learn about the newly-found listing but to also punctually arrive at their office for pre-arranged appointment and then wait for an entire hour until they were available to speak with us, this type of customer service would be unheard of anywhere in north america.

But those things are just annoyances and we learned to accept them as part of the Argentine culture, what's really troubling though is the fact that they lie about the legal status of the documents on properties that they want to "dump fast". When we ask them if the title is complete, they say "yes sure", "titulos perfectos" they add, but then after wasting a couple of weeks of back-and-forth phone conversations and taking time off work to visit the property it turns out that the property does not have a proper "escritura" or that it was an inheritance and that we would be subjected to potential lawsuit from the relatives of the deceased parents if we buy it.

Many properties turn out to be under the category of "sucession" but with "permiso de occupacion" with no real ownership and no re-sale potential, or sometimes there is some legal "poder" living in Spain that cannot come and sign but don't worry, you can still go ahead and pay us your life-savings, just stop expecting to own a legal title because it's optional (that's what they want you to believe), in other words, you can literally buy a property and go live there without even being the owner of that property and then once you build yourself a house you can expect to be kicked out by the original title holder, but they won't tell you that.


One classic problem with documentation, at least here in Buenos Aires province, is the civil code change in 2015 that mandates every ownership transfer to include the plans of the house in the escritura, something that was not mandatory in the past when many people built their homes illegally without any architectural designs or drawings, so now that they want to sell their 2 hectare hobby farm with an old, poorly build (no foundation!) collapsing house, they expect the buyer to pay for new plans on a house that will most likely be demolished after the purchase.

Since when is it the buyer's problem that the seller has no money to make new plans?


With private property sellers we reduced our expectations drastically, we no longer want a half decent house with good paved acces, we are okay now with a s#$%^y rotten house with bad wiring, leaky pipes and overgrown garden somewhere on a dirt road away from civilization - as long as the papers are right and the owner is reasonable in regards to asking-price and straight forward about the existing problems, but even that proves to be difficult since the owners are doing their absolute best to hide as much as they can.

They lie about the age of the structure, construction details, volume of existing water on property, soil quality, access issues etc..

But why hide it if the buyer is likely to investigate anyways? And once they find you lied about one little thing, they won't trust you again. Is the Argentine buyer really that stupid that lying has become a normal way of convincing them into buying real estate?

Nobody wants to waste their money for nothing especially when speaking of hard earned savings. It's hard to understand the Argentine mind-set, often times they behave much like the realtors, acting like they are doing you a favorite by picking up their phone.

There are times when we just want to say: "Do you want to sell your property or not? Make up your mind sir." And maybe they are not in hurry to sell, after all, Argentine's aren't exactly motivated by new opportunities...

In north america the buyer is the one doing a favor by offering money in exchange for a property that is eager and ready to sell, apparently in Argentina the law of gravity does not work.

Is it a crime to want to know everything about the property? Yes I want to see the roof please because that will affect my offering price, and why is it unreasonable to make a lower offer if we see that your property is going to require back-breaking labor for the next ten years?

Negotiating is hard here but we are more patience now and taking it slow, knowing that rural real estate requires special attention and infinite caution. Now we know why so many people are buying apartments in "pozo" and empty lots, because it's headache-free and yet it should be infinitely easier to buy small rural hobby farm that urban people aren't interested in anyways, go figure...

To any and all interested in the process of real estate purchase, as well as all other items pertaining to real estate, please find a link below to an ebook I penned on the subject, free of charge.

'The Real Deal' by M. Götz.pdf​

drive.google.com

I'll be hosting a webinar sponsored by the Argentina-Texas Chamber of Commerce, February 9th, on this very subject. Also free, and open to all!

Warm regards,

Max.-
Maximiliano Götz
[email protected]
+54 911 5329 7248
www.mgotz.com

 

[Neirobiologist]

The nineteen year old wannabe gangsta was the wayward (uncontrollable) son of a very nice family who works on the quinta about 200 meters from my house.

oh , man! Steve! what are fkk is going here and still why, Steve?
i am so sorry for your experience. And thank You for sharing.

So you insist on always to hire the security agenica?

Nowdays I am going to buy 4 hactares of chacra on La Costa. And i m searching all hidden problems.

 

[nikad]

oh , man! Steve! what are fkk is going here and still why, Steve?
i am so sorry for your experience. And thank You for sharing.

So you insist on always to hire the security agenica?

Nowdays I am going to buy 4 hactares of chacra on La Costa. And i m searching all hidden problems.

I Am getting nervous already. Be careful. Do get your own escribano to check things out.

 

[Redpossum]

WTF? How did this get necro'ed from five years ago?

 

[steveinbsas]

WTF? How did this get necro'ed from five years ago?

I posted the link in response to questions asked in this thread:

Power of Attorney at a land sale

Buying rural or semi-rural property can be hard and also "somewhat" risky.

Living there can also be "somewhat" safe as well as very dangerous.

I know from experience (13 years of living in a semi-rural location) and I want anyone considering doing so to be well aware of the risks, as well as the rewards (like not being affected in any negative way whatsoever during the plandemic).

PS: My house and the galpon are no longer for sale, only the 2500 mt2 lot beside my house...and only for sale to a DIY prepper.