Straight talk · 2 July 2026 · 5 min read
When a deal goes wrong: what actually happens.
Most Spanish purchases complete without drama. But “most” is not “all”, and an industry that never mentions the failure cases is an industry asking you not to think. So here are the ways deals die, and what happens to the money each time.
Due diligence finds a problem
The most common failure, and the system working as designed. The lawyer finds an embargo, a licence gap, a community levy: the buyer walks. If you only paid a reservation with a subject-to-checks clause, the deposit comes back. This is why the sequence matters: small reservation first, checks, then the 10% arras. Buyers who put down the big deposit before the checks have given away their leverage.
The buyer cannot complete in time
The saddest one, because it is usually self-inflicted: a mortgage started too late, funds stuck in transit, a sale at home delayed. Miss the arras deadline and the seller can keep the deposit. Prevention is boring and total: finance moving before the arras, money in Spain a week early, and a mortgage clause in the contract where the seller will accept one.
The seller pulls out
Rarer, and expensive for them: under a proper arras penitenciales they repay double your deposit. It happens in rising markets when a higher offer appears; the doubled deposit is your compensation. What you cannot easily do is force the sale, which is why the arras wording (and having your own lawyer write it) matters so much.
The developer fails
The off-plan case. Spanish law requires stage payments to be bank-guaranteed, so a failed project means a claim, not a loss, provided the guarantee was real and your money went to the right account. That “provided” is the whole game: our off-plan guide covers the checks.
The pattern, again
Every failure mode above is either prevented or cushioned by the same three things: the right sequence, the right contract wording, and your own lawyer. Nothing about it is luck. That is the most reassuring thing we can tell you, because it means the risks are managed by process, and process is exactly what you are hiring.