Buying a Spanish Villa: Part II

The Decision

The square was bustling with tourists shopping, dining, and enjoying their Spanish holiday. Three cold Alhambra Reservas sat sweating on the table in front of us next to a small dish of olives. The kids ran to the adjacent playground and Nico rolled his cigarette.

“Well, what do we want to do?” Nico asked, eyebrows raised.
“We want to put in an offer.”
“Okay then.”

Nico grabbed his phone from his pocket and called the selling realtor. They talked for a few minutes in rapid Spanish as we sipped our cool beers and picked at the olives. We occasionally glanced at each other, a silent conversation playing out between our eyes. Soon Nico hung up the phone and shared what the realtor had to say.

There was already an offer on the house.

A few months before, a buyer from the UK had placed an offer, but was struggling to secure a visa due to complications caused by Brexit. Although this posed a hurdle, Nico assured us it wouldn’t necessarily harm our chances of having our offer accepted.

He’d draw up the paperwork and get it to us that night.
We shook hands, kissed cheeks, and left the square in slight disbelief and a little buzzed.

Greedy Americans

The next couple of weeks served as an exercise in faith and patience. While the seller loosely accepted our offer, they wanted to be fair to the potential buyer from the UK. They gave them one week to get their visa in order and move forward with the purchase, or they would move on to us.

I felt a myriad of feelings that week: excitement, fear, worry, impatience, certainty, uncertainty, and so forth. Would the other buyer come through with the visa in a Hail Mary move to win the house? Or would we intercept them at the pass? We spent that week getting our own affairs in order in case things worked out in our favor.

The week eventually came to an end with no movement on the other buyer’s end and the gauntlet passed to us.

That scene in Under The Tuscan Sun where Diane Lane steals the house from the other buyers kept running through my mind:

“You greedy Americans. You think you’re so entitled. You ruin everything!“

“A lot of us feel really badly about that.”

Wells, Audrey, director. Under the Tuscan Sun. Touchstone Pictures, 2003.

Though I’m not sure I felt so bad. Casa Durillo was OURS! Or, at least we had a chance. Ahead of us lay a mountain of obstacles but Chris and I were certain: moving forward was the next right step.

To be continued…