The former solicitor who ran the largest sole proprietor practice in the UK in the 1990s has come out of retirement on the Costa del Sol to offer a conveyancing-to-home-maintenance service to Britons buying property in Spain.

Brian Marson, who owned Kent firm Marsons and was chairman of First Title Insurance, has set up HomeAnswersEurope to help property buyers confused by the Spanish system and frustrated by local lawyers' poor client care.


He says the associated local law firm he has set up - LegalAnswers - operates like an English practice, adopting the Law Society accounts rules in a country where office and client accounts 'often get very confused'. They also have longer opening hours than local lawyers; he says Spanish lawyers often close at 3.30pm.


He has two Spanish lawyers on staff as non-lawyers can own Spanish law firms. Existing links with HBOS led to the firm joining the bank's Spanish panel. Mr Marson said he plans to approach other banks and lenders, and also extend the service to other Europeans looking to buy in Spain. He continues to offer title insurance.


He said the venture has attracted enough work to get it off the ground and that it is estimated that another 400,000 Britons will look to buy property in Spain over the next five years, taking the total to a million.


In another innovation for the domestic market, the company is offering a national service. 'We have handled properties from Barcelona to Gibraltar, Lanzarote to Majorca,' he said. 'We charge 1% of the purchase price [the standard conveyancing fee in Spain],' Mr Marson explained. 'The average purchase price is 300,000 euro, so the fee is very attractive.' Then there are fees for the other home services offered.


The work takes a long time to complete, however, because of Spanish bureaucracy, and there are also questionable practices, such as cash paid up-front to reduce the purchase price and thus tax liability. 'We simply say that we are not going to do it,' Mr Marson said, despite the threat of losing work as a result.


Mr Marson retired to Spain because of ill-health. The climate has helped this, he said, 'and after three or four months we were going crazy' - his wife was Marsons' practice director. 'We didn't fancy golfing or opening a pub,' he said. 'This is what we knew about.'


Link: www.homeanswerseurope.com