Housing risks, regulations and home health explained with official data and no fluff.
You pay per square metre, but the figure in the listing is written by the seller or the agency, and it doesn't always mean what you think. Before making an offer it's worth knowing how many square metres the property really has and what k
A «charge» (carga) is any debt or third-party right attached to a property which, in many cases, stays with the home even when it changes hands . Buy a home with a seizure or unpaid community fees without knowing and you may end up paying
A fund screening logistics warehouses, a bank reviewing loan collateral, a developer looking for land or a portal enriching its listings all hit the same wall: the official data on a Spanish plot exists, but it's spread across a dozen publi
29 October marks one year since the DANA floods. If you're looking at property around Valencia, in l'Horta Sud, la Ribera or the Hoya de Buñol, ask one question before you fall for anything: was that street under water? We overlaid the of
If you are buying a home in Spain, one document decides whether the sale is even possible: the nota simple. It is the Land Registry's answer to two questions that can cost you everything — who legally owns this property, and what debts are
The DANA of 29 October 2024 was the costliest natural disaster in Spain's history: 229 fatalities in the province of Valencia (237 across the country, per the official toll), more than 82,000 households compensated and an insurance bill abo
When years of savings are on the line, "sounds convincing" isn't good enough. That's why the Hogarfax report doesn't use artificial intelligence to generate its findings: it uses explicit rules and calculations over official data, and when
The paid Hogarfax report now includes a rental reference for each property, built from two independent sources cross-checked geographically down to the finest level possible — not a single city-wide average applied to every home alike.
What would a property really give you if you bought it to rent out? Hogarfax now calculates buy-to-rent ROI using real notary and land registry fees, not a flat percentage, in a new free calculator — and estimated rent for a specific proper
A magnitude 5.0-5.2 earthquake centered in Alhendín shook a large part of Andalusia overnight on Saturday, August 15, 2026, and was felt as far away as Madrid, Murcia, Albacete, and Ciudad Real. It's the strongest moment yet of a seismic sw
A report generated yesterday, while the province of Ávila is home to the largest wildfire in Spain's history, on a home in Cebreros with 27 checks: satellite-detected active fire 115 metres away, proximity to a flood-prone area, and high radon risk, all three on the same 1,937 m² plot.
The Ávila wildfire, now the largest in Spain's history, and the Sierra Oeste of Madrid fire are the context — but the tool we're opening up for free lets you check the wildfire risk of any property in Spain, not just those two provinces. Live map with satellite active fire, dynamic wind, temperature, humidity and news.
The return on a property investment is decided before you sign: in the risks the listing never mentions. This checklist covers the three fronts — the asset, the land and the paperwork — with the official source for each check.
More and more services promise to analyse a Spanish home in minutes. Their websites look similar, their feature lists keep growing and all of them refer to official data. The important difference is not who lists the most features. It is wh
A current listing photo shows today. Official historical orthophotos help you understand how the plot and its surroundings got there before you buy.
Buying a home is the biggest financial decision most people ever make, and yet most of us make it based on photos and a twenty-minute viewing. Before signing anything, there are 12 concrete things to check : the real prices paid in the are
If you are buying a home in Spain and asking where to order a homebuyer survey , here is the straight answer: Spain has no equivalent of the UK survey culture . There is no RICS-style standard product, banks do not require one, and most S
You browse twenty Idealista listings a week and they all tell the same story: nice photos, square metres and a price. What none of them tells you is whether that price is real, whether the surface matches the Cadastre or whether the home is
Before buying a home in Spain you will be told to get two documents that sound alike but are not: the Land Registry extract (nota simple) and the risk report . They do not compete: they answer different questions. The nota simple tells y
Before buying a used car, in many countries you ask for a Carfax : a report with the vehicle's history and risks. A home costs a hundred times more and almost nobody asks for its equivalent. Hogarfax's property report PDF is exactly that
Hogarfax's energy performance certificate check is now part of the free exploration. When the official registry has a result, the report shows the property's rating, emissions and certificate date alongside the rest of the home's data.
The worst wildfire on record in Andalusia happened in an area with barely a handful of fires in a decade. We analyse what the Copernicus perimeters and NASA FIRMS hotspots show, and what home buyers in wildland-urban interface areas can learn.
A home in Los Gallardos analysed on 13 July 2026, while the comarca was in the news because of the major wildfire. The report measured active fire, burnt perimeter and forest distance at plot level, and added a seismic warning that called for a building review.
Buying a home near a dam or reservoir does not automatically mean that the property is unsafe. It is, however, a surroundings factor that may affect the landscape, access, water uses and the questions worth asking before you sign. Hogarfax
A home may be near an electrical substation, wind farm, solar plant, thermal plant or nuclear site without the listing mentioning it. Energy surroundings are broader than the former nuclear check. Hogarfax cross-checks the plot with 8,643 o
A Spanish livestock trail is not simply a rural path drawn near a home. It is public-domain land with a legal width that may affect a plot if the trail crosses it or if its legal strip reaches the boundary. When buying land or studying a bu
An industrial facility near a home may be a light business, a manufacturing plant, an energy installation or a regulated environmental activity. The word industrial does not describe the impact by itself. Before buying, it helps to know wha
A residential house in Almaraz (Cáceres), a stone's throw from the reservoir, with a good floor area and on urban land. Nothing in the listing said so, but the Hogarfax report placed it inside the 10 km radius of the Almaraz nuclear power
An energy facility rarely appears in a property listing, but it can change the surroundings and the questions worth asking before you buy. Hogarfax has expanded its former nuclear check: it now cross-checks each plot with 8,643 BTN25 energy
A landfill never shows up in a property listing, yet it is one of the few nuisances you notice from day one: odours that come and go with the wind, seagulls, the odd extra lorry. From now on, Hogarfax cross-checks each home's location again
The listing will never tell you the plot backs onto a pine forest, that the hillside next door burned last year, or that there is active fire two kilometres away. Satellites will. Here are the four signals the report combines and how to read them.
An apartment in El Escorial (Madrid), well connected —in fact, a step from the train station—. That closeness, sold in the listing as an advantage, had a flip side that Hogarfax's report put into numbers: the railway line runs 14 metres f
A spacious flat in Torrelodones (Madrid), in a good residential area. The buyer was convinced. But Hogarfax's report stacked up three warnings the listing never mentioned: an area near flooding, high radon and a motorway right beside
A buyer had all but closed the purchase of a flat in Santiago de la Ribera (San Javier, Murcia), a step from the Mar Menor. Good area, good price, an established building. They ran the home through Hogarfax before signing and the report rai
Most property reports give you a line of text: «flood zone», «limited use», «power line nearby». And they ask you to believe it. Hogarfax's interactive viewer does something different: it overlays the official layers on the aerial photo of
A foreign buyer wanted to purchase a plot in Oviedo (Asturias) to build on. On paper, everything fitted: a plot of around 2,908 m², classified as urban land in the Cadastre, with the use «development and gardening works, unbuilt land». No
The per-property report solves most cases, but a professional handling dozens or hundreds of properties needs something else: to integrate risk data into their own workflow, without generating reports one by one. That is where an API fits.
A professional verifying a home's risks has two paths: do it by hand, viewer by viewer, or rely on a tool that automates it. Neither is "the right one" for every case. This honest comparison explains when each pays off for agencies, valuers
The agent is only one part of the professional ecosystem around a property transaction. Valuers, mortgage brokers and advisors handle several deals at once and need to verify risks and context quickly and repeatably. For them, a per-propert
The foreign buyer looking for a home in Spain — British, German, Nordic, American — arrives with a specific disadvantage: Spanish legal concepts have no equivalent in their own country. Nota simple, cadastral reference, ITE, DPH/DPMT... are
The best way to understand what a risk report adds to a deal is to see one from the inside. Hogarfax publishes a real example report, with a public cadastral reference and no password, that any professional can open. In this article we walk
More and more estate agencies are attaching a risk report to their property listings. It is not a fad: it is a response to a better-informed, more sceptical buyer, and a simple way to stand out by offering transparency instead of just photo
Every piece of information in a Hogarfax report is public and free. You could gather it yourself. The honest question is not "is it free somewhere else?" — it is — but "how much does it cost you to gather it, know what to look for and read
A property listing shows you the photos, the floor area and the price. What it does not show are a home's physical risks: whether the plot floods, whether the municipality has radon, how much noise there is or what the building faces becaus
Most property tools give you data. Very few help you turn a specific home into a serious acquisition file. Hogarfax's Complete information feature does exactly that: it adds everything you know from the listing, the viewing and the negoti
Most buyers calculate price, mortgage and taxes, yet very few do the exercise that most often changes the economics of a resale purchase: estimating what it will cost to make the property genuinely fit for use. Hogarfax's renovation cost ca
The most common mistake when buying a home is not necessarily overpaying. It is miscalculating how much cash the transaction actually requires. Many buyers think about the deposit and forget transfer tax, notary and Land Registry fees, the
When you buy a flat, sign a tenancy agreement or pay IBI property tax, one code appears on all those documents even though you may never have paid it much attention. It is called the referencia catastral, or cadastral reference, and in prac
There is one piece of information you will never find on property portals. It does not appear in the photographs or the building specifications, and the bank does not ask about it before approving a mortgage. It is environmental noise pollu
On 29 October 2024, a DANA caused 230 deaths, damaged 69,000 homes and led to more than 13 billion euros in direct losses in the province of Valencia alone. Many of those buildings had stood for decades on flood-prone land. Their owners eit
There is a gas you cannot see, cannot smell and cannot feel... yet it could be building up in your home right now. It is called radon, and the World Health Organization classifies it as a Group 1 carcinogen: the highest-risk category for hu
When searching for a home, you look at the floor area, orientation and neighbourhood. You rarely ask whether the plot lies within a public-domain strip, whether an easement zone limits what you can do there, or whether the official coastlin
You buy a flat for EUR 200,000, negotiate hard over every last euro... and two months later the first letter from the property manager arrives: an EUR 8,000 special assessment per unit to refurbish the facade, approved at a homeowners' meet
“This property scores 61 out of 100.” Few things are as persuasive as a large number displayed in green or red: it condenses weeks of uncertainty into a single glance. That is precisely why it deserves more scrutiny than anything else in th
There is one detail property portals never highlight. It appears in official mapping, it is recorded in electricity company records, and it affects thousands of plots across Spain: proximity to a high-voltage power line.
Today, you can order a ‘complete’ report on any home in Spain and receive it within minutes. It sounds like magic. And as with any magic trick, it helps to know what is genuine technology and what is sleight of hand. Some information really
There is no single answer to the question, 'Is it bad to live near an industrial estate?' An office-based business park and a chemical plant may share the same planning classification, but they have nothing in common from the perspective of
When looking for a flat or house, you focus on the price, floor area, and neighbourhood. Yet one detail rarely included in the listing can determine virtually everything you are allowed to do with the property: the planning classification o
The nota simple is the single most important document you can request before buying a home: it tells you who owns the property and what charges are registered against it. Precisely for that reason, it has become the flagship promise of many
When looking for a home, you may treat the climate as a matter of personal preference: whether you prefer hot or cold weather, sunshine or rain. But there is another way to assess a location's climate that has little to do with comfort and
You buy a property, move in, and shortly afterwards discover damp the seller never mentioned, a dangerous electrical installation or a crack hidden under fresh paint. These are the feared vicios ocultos : serious defects that are not visib
In Spain, it is perfectly legal to sell a 10-square-metre flat. Or an 8-square-metre one. Or even a 6-square-metre one. A dwelling's legal status does not depend solely on its floor area, but on whether the property has a certificate of occ
Spain is not Japan, but neither is it immune to earthquakes. The south and south-east of mainland Spain — and parts of the Pyrenees — face a genuine seismic hazard that building regulations have recognised for decades. If you are planning t
Part of the due diligence on a Spanish property can be completed from your sofa using official sources in a matter of minutes. The other part cannot: it is stored in the files of the seller, the property manager and the bank. The difference
You have been searching for weeks. You have found two or three properties that could work. You have viewed them, taken photos and made mental notes. Now comes the hardest part: which one makes the most sense to buy? Comparing homes from mem
You have found a flat on a property portal such as Idealista or Fotocasa. The photos look good and the price is within budget. But a listing only shows what the seller wants you to see. Before arranging a viewing, making an offer, or signin
The temptation is understandable: if there is a Street View image of the façade and an aerial view of the roof, why not 'diagnose' the building from a computer? Some services already produce entire paragraphs about cracks, corrosion and wat
Since 2022, buying or inheriting a home in Spain comes with a new number that can cost you money: the valor de referencia del Catastro. It is the minimum tax base the tax authorities use to calculate transaction taxes, and if you do not kno
When you buy a second-hand car, the first thing you check is the MOT. When you buy a second-hand home, almost nobody asks whether the building's mandatory inspection is up to date. And yet it exists, it is compulsory once a building reaches
A building's age is not a neutral fact. It does not mean that the property is good or bad—some buildings from the 1960s are better maintained than others built in 2005—but it does place it in a specific technical context: the regulations in
You see a listing you like. A flat, a house, commercial premises or a plot of land. You call. You ask questions. Perhaps you arrange a viewing. Everything seems to fit. Then comes the question very few buyers ask before committing: what els
In 2026, putting ‘AI-powered’ on the cover of almost any product boosts sales. Property reports are no exception: AI analysis, AI valuation, AI risk detection. We work with this technology every day, which is why we can tell you what the ma
Asking prices in Spain sit well above actual closed prices. How the Land Registry's transaction data reveals real market value before you make an offer.
An 8-point checklist for buying property in Spain: cadastral reference, nota simple, flood, radon, land use, ITE and price, each linking to a full guide.
While you read the sample
Enter the address and check its risks for free: flood zone, wildfire, radon and what the Cadastre says.
4.5 on Trustpilot