Habitation certificates

Re­cently there has been a huge up­roar re­gard­ing Hab­it­a­tion Cer­ti­fic­ates (Cedu­las de Hab­it­ab­il­idad), or also known as Oc­cu­pa­tion Li­cense (Li­cen­cia de ocu­pac­ción)

By law, it is the vendor´s re­spons­ib­il­ity to provide a valid Hab­it­a­tion Cer­ti­fic­ate. Most cer­ti­fic­ates are valid for 5 years, de­pend­ing on the town.

The first step is to ar­range for an ar­chi­tect to visit the prop­erty to col­lect the in­form­a­tion and meas­ure­ments. This cer­ti­fic­ate will have to be sub­mit­ted to the Town Hall along with copy of your ID, util­ity bills, SUMA and a copy of the deeds.

Once the doc­u­ment­a­tion has been checked and ap­proved they will stamp the ap­plic­a­tion form, now known as “De­clara­cion Re­spons­ible” which is valid as an ac­tual cer­ti­fic­ate.

There are a lot of as­pects that the Town hall take in to con­sid­er­a­tion and ob­tain­ing this cer­ti­fic­ate is not al­ways as easy as it seems. The au­thor­it­ies have be­come very strict.

If you are plan­ning to sell your house please make sure pa­per­work is be­ing taken care of to avoid delays on com­ple­tion.

When you are buy­ing a new build prop­erty the cer­ti­fic­ate that you will re­ceive from the builder should be valid for 10 years in­stead of 5 years.