With your residency issue, and particular requirement, it might be worth getting independent financial advice.

I’ve pasted links below to the CGT guide and how to find an IFA.

This is the sort of info you will find:-

To work out your Capital Gains Tax you’ll need to look separately at each asset disposed of that’s liable to Capital Gains Tax and in straightforward cases:
Take the disposal proceeds (usually the amount received) and deduct your costs and tax reliefs to work out each gain or loss.
Add together all of your gains for that tax year.
Add together all of the losses you’ve made for that tax year.
Deduct any allowable losses you’ve made that year from the gains to work out the overall gain or loss.
If the overall gain is below the annual tax-free allowance (known as the ‘Annual Exempt Amount’), there’s no Capital Gains Tax to pay. The Annual Exempt Amount for individuals is £10,100 for 2009-10 and 2010-11.
If the overall gain is above the Annual Exempt Amount, you may be able to deduct unused losses from earlier years.
If the overall gain is still above the Annual Exempt Amount, you deduct the Annual Exempt Amount and work out the tax on the balance. The rate of tax is 18 per cent for 2009-10. Follow the ‘Capital Gains Tax rates’ link below to find the rates of tax for other years

The government probably took it for non payment of taxes. But if you seriously want to check this out you better go to that part of Spain and visit the area in person.

My friend moved to Spain a few years ago. Her husband died unexpectedly of cancer this year, she has also recently lost her job in Spain. Her husband was 50% owner of a house his mother is living in, in England and she would now like to sell her (her late husbands) 50% of the property to her mother-in-law, or sell the house totally and split the proceeds.

Her mother-in-law is keeping quiet on the whole mater and will obviously not entertain buying out my fiends share or entertain selling the house and splitting the proceeds. She would rather sit pretty, in the house. I’m told there is a 10k mortgage on the house remaining.

So now you know the background. The question is:

Is it possible to force a sale?
How can my friend monetise her 50% of the property?

Thanks

Are you certain that your friend inherited her husband’s share of the property? Property can be jointly owned in one of two ways - beneficial joint tenants or beneficial tenants in common (the word tenant here having nothing to do with renting). In a joint tenancy when one owner dies the other owner(s) continue to own the entire property between them. The deceased’s share no longer exists and so cannot be passed on.

But assuming there was a tenancy in common, and the friend now owns 50% with the mother in law:

Any joint ownership automatically creates a trust, so trust law is required for a solution. The mother in law is probably now the sole legal owner (trustee) holding on trust for herself and your friend. Under a trust beneficiaries have a right to live in the property, if it is suitable for such. This is why the mother in law can live there. However. clearly a single property is not always suitable for all the beneficiaries to live in together, so the occupiers are required to compensate other beneficiaries - IE by paying rent for their share. So while the mother in law is living there she could be made to pay a fair rent to your friend for her 50%.

Beneficiaries can also apply to court for an order relating to the property, if there is a dispute. Often the courts order a sale, so each party can take their share and go their own way. However, if the purpose of the trust still exists this is less likely, and the courts do not like putting people onto the street who have no other means of support. In this case it seems that the purpose of the trust was to provide a home for the mother in law (her son never lived there with her it seems). This purpose is ongoing. Similarly, I assume she is elderly and has no other means of buying her own home if left with only 50% of the current one? In which case she would not be evicted just so someone else can realise the cash value of their share.

I suspect also, that if push came to shove and the mother in law has no means of paying rent now, the court would order that the payments could be deferred and deducted from her share when the property is eventually sold when she passes away.

1) The Euro/Sterling exchange rate is so poor that the amount of sterling required to purchase a property means that, in real terms, prices are not as low as you might think.

2) The vast majority of those moving to Spain are either retired, or reliant on a small pension or other income from the UK - and again, the exchange rate means that the cost of living is nowhere near as cheap as it used to be.

or

do you think it would be wise to hold back and see if the pound becomes stronger ??

Blue, I consider myself highly experienced in making all the wrong decisions when it comes to buying properties in Spain. My many mistakes prompted me to research this matter in depth and create a website on this subject ( http://www.tumbit.com/ )
My advise would be that sure, there will be many bargains out there, but equally so there will be many melons on the market aswell. Don’t let the cost of a property let you make any rash decisions and above all else take appropriate advise from an experienced and professionally qualified source - don’t cut corners here - there are factors that need to be considered that would not even appear on your radar in the UK.

If you are an estate agent in Spain, then you will not need to be told about internet marketing because you probably get enquiries every day from companies telling you how they can provide leads through this portal or that. Spinning you with figures about how many hits their website is getting and their page 1 ranking for this key phrase or that keyword.

To the novice, this all sounds too good to be true and can be a little daunting. The jargon of the internet only becomes aware to those of us who use it, when you try explaining something to your grandparents and get a blank faced response of ‘Yes Dear’. It’s a humbling experience!

So lets explode a few myths, explain some jargon and give you, the estate agent, the tools required to ask the right questions, so that when you are spending your money on internet related exposure, you are getting the right exposure, in the correct market to attract the buyer clients you want.

I am using the Costa del Sol as an example, but is good for most property markets in Spain.

The first question to ask is where do your clients come from?
On the Costa del Sol the largest proportion of buyers come from the UK. So the market you should be targeting exposure in should be the UK Search Engines of the major companies. As Google owns about 70% of all the search traffic then we will focus on Google, but do not dismiss Yahoo and MSN who carry the majority of the rest. 30% is still a lot of traffic.

If you are searching on a computer in Spain and type in Google you will be sent to Google Espana, the Spanish version of Google. This is the most common mistake most people make. These results are NOT what people in the UK see when looking for Spanish Property. This is not the version of Google you will find if you type in Google from a computer in the UK. The results from any search will be different on Google Espana where the majority of searches are for words and phrases in Spanish.

To check the results on Google UK, you need to specify www . google . co. uk . This will give you the results that your buyers are looking at and is where you will need to be seen if you want to attract their business.

The second question is how does the potential website that is after your money rate in the scheme of things.
One of the best comparative measures is the Alexa ranking of a website. Alexa(dot)com ranks millions of websites and rates them in terms of worldwide traffic. The LOWER the alexa ranking figure, the more important the website is, in terms of the amount of visitors it receives.

One note of caution. When you compare websites in terms of the amount of traffic they receive, be sure that the website is property only related. A website that acts as a directory for everything Spanish may have lots of traffic and a good alexa ranking, but if only 5% of that traffic is looking for property with 95% looking for the best place in Spain to buy a toothbrush, then…. well you get the point I am sure.

The other measure of traffic is the number of unique visitors a website receives. This is NOT the same as the number of hits a website receives. If fact I would be bold enough to say that anybody that tries to sell you something on the back of the number of hits their website receives should be dismissed immediately. Why?
Well, a hit on a website page counts the number of images exposed on a web page and is not a reflection of the number of people that visit that page.

A webpage may have 25 pictures or other images on it. Every time a person visits that page it will register as 1 unique visitor or 25 hits. People who sell on the back of their hits per day figures are trying to mislead you and blind you with zeros.

Unique visitors on the otherhand will give you a good indication of how many people are visiting any particular site. Add to this the average page views per visitor, a figure that shouls easily be available in this day and age of Google Analytics and you are well on the way to getting an understanding of which websites matter and which don’t.

Neil Ebsworth
http://www.articlesbase.com/non-fiction-articles/where-to-market-property-on-the-internet-and-why-some-simple-rules-137481.html