There's an interesting article in the Daily Mail about the dangers of buying a "bargain" Property in Spain.  According to the article, the register containing details of Spain's three million empty homes fails to highlight all of those properties that are scheduled to be demolished.  Worryingly, this is the Official Register of houses and is administered by the Spanish government.

From the article:

A Money Mail investigation has discovered that Spanish officials have embarked on a huge marketing push to flog some of the nation’s estimated three million empty properties.

But, at the same time, the country’s official register of houses includes many which have been built without planning permission and are now at the centre of a huge legal row.

The formal register is supposed to act as a safeguard for potential buyers — anything listed on it effectively has the government’s stamp of approval.

As a result, British buyers flooding to Spain seeking a bargain are at risk of purchasing a property which should never have been built.  Around one million illegal homes were constructed by crooked developers and local town halls over the past ten years during the property boom.

It is thought as many as 100,000 were unwittingly bought by expats who were gulled by unscrupulous builders, lawyers and estate agents, with victims ploughing their life savings into apartments and villas that were built on protected land.  Many of these now stand empty or are set to be demolished.

To restore confidence in its ailing housing market, the Spanish government now wants to sell some of the nation’s vacant homes. Some, which do not have planning permission or are unlikely ever to be sold, are being demolished.

So officials have set up a website, run by the equivalent of our own Land Registry, which is supposed to tell buyers if a home was built with the proper permissions. It lists important details such as legal notices and debts that the property has attached to it.

But Money Mail has discovered that some homes listed on the website are, in fact, illegal and even have demolition orders against them. Yet these crucial facts are missing from the official register.

At the same time, estate agents are drumming up business by flogging bargain-basement homes which are illegal and, in some cases, set to be bulldozed.

This sort of revelation just re-emphasizes the image of Spain as being like the Wild West and shows that even after all of the property scandals that have come to light in recent years, lessons have not been learned by the Spanish and it's can still be a big gamble to buy in Spain.