Can someone with knowledge/experience with purchasing/selling real estate in BA lay out the basics and steps involved, costs etc in purchasing a condo in the city? The prices look too good to be true.
Be prepared to play a cat and mouse game with the crooked realtors who want to hide the truth and jack up the price, squeezing the maximum possible out of you by comparison to the better properties you could have bought with the same amount of money. It also depends on how generous and patient you are and whether or not you are willing to study the market by taking it slow.
Realtor can and will most likely lie about plumbing, services, building expenses, assessed value, square meters, etc, you must check everything yourself and push your escrow office to double check the documents and unpaid bills, otherwise you will end up like me, paying previous owner's unpaid gas, electricity and water bills. the utility companies don't care who owes the money, to transfer the service under your name they force you to pay up, luckily the amounts I paid weren't too bad.
If the building you are interested in is old, some love those old colonial ones, check and see if it has lead plumbing, don't listen to what the realtor says, go in with a cutter and scratch the pipes to see if they are soft or not, usually under the bathroom sink there are some pipes exposed. Also check if the building (even if relatively new) wasn't painted recently, this can be an indication that something was wrong and some cracked were sealed and now it's all covered and you would never know what structural problems it might have (very common because those idiot contractors pour cement at noon on hot scorching days instead of doing it early in the mornings or on a cloudy day, very little building oversight.)
Overall I would not recommend buying into a brand new condo building unless you know who the architect is and the quality of construction. Most buildings are NOT built well. I walked around construction sites countless times looking at exposed rebar at the bottoms of balconies and at the load baring concrete pillars, they cover it all and think it's ok, then several years later the rust comes through the paint and the building loses value fast.
The windows in new building are often times of horrendous quality, I used to rent in a new building and the rain water was accumulating inside the window frame, there was always black mold under the window, even the in the summer! i painted it and even left dehumidifier there but no, rain is rain and when it's built like shit then that's what you are going to get.
If you got money then go and look up a good architect with full building specs and go see every detail for yourself, talk to neighbor before you even talk to the realtor. Extra homework in this corrupt country comes a long way.
Otherwise, the time to invest within CABA is now. We hit the rock bottom already this year and I believe it's only going to go up from now on, albeit slowly, thanks to the looming default but demand is rising, too many young motivated venezuelans, hard working bolivians, paraguayans, tranditional families and myriad of other people who are saving dollars, patiently waiting for their chance to get into the real estate market of BA.
