A week in August is not research.

We are a buying agent. Telling you to rent for a year before you buy is not obviously in our interest, and we say it anyway.

The people who buy well on this coast are almost always the people who lived here first. It is consistent enough that we now treat it as the default advice for anyone moving over rather than buying a holiday place.

What a holiday cannot tell you

You visit in June. The terrace is glorious, the town is busy, the beach is ten minutes away and the drive from Málaga took forty minutes.

Now try the same place in January, when half the restaurants on that strip are shut and the urbanisation is three-quarters empty. Or in mid-August, when the same forty-minute drive takes twice that and the parking near the beach is gone by nine in the morning.

None of that is a reason not to buy. It is a reason to know which version you are buying into before you commit several hundred thousand euro to it.

The things people change their minds about

Almost everyone who rents here for a year revises at least one of their original requirements. The usual ones:

• The town. Far and away the most common. People arrive set on one place and buy two towns over, usually somewhere quieter or better connected than the one they had in mind.
• Sea view versus walkable. A view you look at is worth less than a town you can walk into for bread and a coffee. Plenty of people trade the view once they have lived with one.
• The hill. Elevated urbanisations photograph beautifully. A year of driving everywhere, including to buy milk, changes how appealing that is.
• Community and pool. Some people discover they want the buzz of a busy complex. Others discover they want a street door and no communal anything.

Every one of those revisions is cheap to make as a renter and expensive to make as an owner. Buying and selling here carries transaction costs at both ends, so changing your mind after purchase is a genuinely costly correction.

Renting makes you a better buyer, not just a safer one

A year in means you know what a fair rent looks like, which translates directly into knowing what a fair price looks like. You have walked the streets at night. You know which developments have works pending and which community has been arguing about the roof for three years.

You will also be buying as a resident rather than from abroad, and that changes the mortgage picture. Spanish banks typically lend non-residents 60 to 70% of the price, and residents up to 80%.

You will already hold your NIE, a Spanish bank account and a history here. The paperwork that slows a purchase from Ireland is behind you.

When renting first is the wrong advice

We are not going to pretend it always applies.

If you are buying a holiday home to use for a few weeks a year, a year of rent is money spent on a problem you do not have. If you already know the coast well, perhaps you have holidayed in the same town for a decade, you may know more than a year of renting would teach you.

And in a rising market, waiting has a cost. That cost is real and worth weighing, though it tends to be smaller than the cost of buying in the wrong town.

How we handle it

We will help you find a long-term rental through letting agents and landlords we know here, and we do not charge you for it.

We will also tell you plainly what the 2023 housing law says about who pays the letting fee, because some agencies on this coast still charge tenants and most renters never think to ask.

Then we stay in touch, roughly monthly, and not at all if you would rather we did not. If buying comes into view a year later, we know you and we know the area you chose. If it never does, that is fine too.

Talk to us about renting first

Related: what you need to sign a Spanish lease and buying once you already live here.