Most cases take from 12-24 months to complete. However, depending on the case, type of documentation you have, the Court’s backlog and other variables, some cases could take a bit longer. A usual claim will develop as follows:
1. We obtain the necessary documentation from you and we formalise an extrajudicial complaint.
2. In most cases, we need to confirm your payments to the developer currently under insolvency proceedings. This process is the slowest but it is a necessary step to ensure the success of your claim.
3. Once confirmed, we contact the bank to pay, negotiate or get a settlement.
4. If the bank doesn’t reply or their response is not satisfactory, we will file the lawsuit and start the judicial process.
5. Once the lawsuit has been filed, the matter is officially in the Court’s system (quite lengthy sometimes) and will follow the judicial procedure. We will keep you posted with our monthly progress report.
Please be aware that should you not be able to provide us with a copy or the original contract signed with developer and proof of having paid the amounts from your account to the specific account held by the developer, we could try to request this documentation on your behalf before filing the lawsuit. In these cases, your claim could be delayed as we won’t be able to start the claim until we get those documents.

The basis for the claim for a refund of a deposit for an off-plan property in Spain has been established by a series of Spanish Supreme Court cases, the latest of these was December 2015, which established the following:

• A developer is legally required to provide a Bank Guarantee to the buyer where the property is not yet finished and where no Licence of First Occupation (LFO) has been obtained.
• The full amount of money paid prior to completion of the Spanish Property is guaranteed, not just the amount set out in the guarantee, even if this right appears to have been waived by the buyer.
• It is the developer’s obligation (not the buyer’s) to ensure that deposited funds are placed in a special account. The fact that the developer did not do this does not affect the buyer’s rights to a refund of deposits paid.
• Even if the developer did not comply with their legal obligation to give the buyer a bank guarantee, the bank with whom the funds were held is still jointly responsible for refunding this money to the buyer because the bank has a duty to ensure that the developer complied with its legal obligations.
• The bank (or insurer who issued the guarantee) are jointly and severally liable which means that the buyer can sue the bank or the insurance company without having to first sue the developer.
• The banks can be sued regardless of whether there was a bank guarantee in place or not.

Even though no claim can have a 100% success rate, Off-Plan Property claims are accepted in a very high percentage and, unless your case is very peculiar, we are very likely to win your claim. Anyway, remember that we operate under a "no win, no fee" policy, so, in the remote case that we get an unsuccessful outcome, you would not have to pay for our services.

If you have lost money when buying off plan property in Spain, Legalbono can help you.

You just have to upload the documentation required and we will arrange a free assessment of your claim with no obligation, to see if you are eligible to get the refund of the money you have lost in relation to your Spanish property deposits.

You can only claim for a refund once, so we advise you to choose Legalbono to get your money back. We have been handling this kind of cases since 2006 with a 99.9% success rate.

If you start your property deposit claim as soon as possible and the documentation that supports the amounts advanced and contract are provided, the chances of recovering the money are very high.

The banks are responsible for any irregularity committed by a third party in many cases. If for any reason, a developer is faced with conflicting costs should naturally constitute an endorsement of a solvent entity to support any delay in construction. By failing to do so, he has left you, the helpless consumer, unable to recover that money. Thankfully, your chances of recovering your lost funds are high because a bank is jointly responsible for a foreign business.

The statute of limitations for this claim is fixed at 15 years if you entered into the contract before October 2015, being October 2020 the ultimate deadline for issuing a claim. It is 2 years counting from the date the developer breached the contract if you signed the contract after January 2016 and a bank guarantee has been provided.

The minimum documentation we need to start your claim and get your money is the following:

• Contracts signed with the Developer .
• Proof of all payments.