How I Bought my Little House in Italy during the Pandemic - Everything You Need to Know

today i wanted to just talk to you about what i learned when i bought my house in [Music] italy [Music] if i look at all the places in the world that i visited italy has probably been the most visited place by me and i just love the culture i love the food obviously i love the people the community and of course the architecture is fantastic i really uh decided right this is what i want to do i want to buy a little small house just for me that whenever i need to have a little bit of a pause or a break from life i would be able to go there so i started to save a little bit uh from my yoga business and i was able to buy my dream house just before and i mean literally just before the pandemic hit i went to italy on february 15 2020 and this was really right before things got really bad in italy and before they stopped having international travel and i spent a few days um finding my dream house in italy so i would say that there's two things if you're deciding to buy a house in italy first and foremost is to narrow down your location so it's really important for you to decide where you want to live do your research if you've been to italy before and there's a certain area that you're just drawn to that is the location so narrow it down that this is where you want to be i would say location first and then house second i wanted to be in tuscany but and there's a big butt here southern tuscany is a lot more expensive than northwest tuscany so i had then my budget i'm gonna tell you right now that i bought my house in uh italy for just over 100 000 euros where can i get a house that i want for this budget how much do you want to spend on your house do you need to have a mortgage and what is your renovations budget so your renovations are going to vary if you're going to basically buy something that needs to be gutted inside and out your renovation budget is going to be huge if you want something that needs in one sense minimal renovations like mine then you know you need to sort of calculate that in and have that a figure in your mind for minimal budget renovations look at about like 200 euros per square meter whatever your house is that's for minimal that's like on a budget that's me right there and i wanted to be in the town itself because i wanted to be able to walk to the restaurants to the cafes to all the shops and what i would say is that the small towns and villages is where the bargains are to be had so i hired basically a house finder management company and i'm gonna put the details down below of who i used and they were fantastic so by the way this is not an ad for them they probably have no idea that i'm doing this so but i did find um a house finder and thank goodness i did because especially during the pandemic it was really difficult as far as closing on this house um photos online aren't really great they'll only show you like 12 photos and so i would say you do need to go to see it but have someone as a house finder set it up for you so what i did is i found the house finder property organizer and i told them the area that i wanted northwest tuscany and what they did was when i uh i said i'm going to book a trip uh in february please can you show me houses within this budget that needed some renovation but not like you know a writ down and uh put it back together again type of house i arrived and they had booked in i think about 12 properties for me to see um which was fantastic but with the house finder you don't have to keep taking the trips over and over again um especially if you're traveling from the states that can cost you a lot of money house finders are worth that expense can i get a mortgage yes you can i did i got a mortgage of about 60 of my house so my house was just over 100 000 euros so i got a mortgage for about 60 000 euros and it needs to be within an italian bank again uh the house finding agency property organizers really helped me with that there was a fee involved with them and i'm going to get into my fees in a little bit with them but um they helped me find this mortgage they told me everything i needed to send them i had to send them obviously a copy of my american social security number even my uk national insurance number tax summary and then i had to confirm obviously my self-employment my accountant was amazing my accountant over here was just able to basically send everything uh that i needed um which was which was absolutely fantastic as a side note once you submit these to the mortgage this is just another little nut little this is a cost all of your personal documents that you're sending over for the mortgage uh you do have to have them translated into italian and then authenticated by an italian court and that cost was about a thousand euros to have all of my documents translated and also authenticated by the italian courts once you've put your offer in and it was accepted they do ask you to put down like a good faith deposit and it's about one to two percent immediately right after that you can uh get into the legally binding contract so and then you need to put down at least 10 percent of more of a deposit so whatever your purchase price is you would put 10 percent down then it moves on to this next stage with the basically a notary and think of a notary is like they do the signing and the reading of the deed um when you're ready to basically close when you're ready to complete so it's like a notary is like a notary a lawyer and a title company all in one so some of the costs for the cost for the notary we're gonna base it on a hundred thousand uh euro house it's about uh 2500 euros but that includes the purchase deed and the mortgage deed then you're going to have taxes if you're going to be registering it as a second home or a holiday home it's going to be a little bit higher so this was 3 500 euros is what i had to pay for that because i was getting a mortgage i had a bank arrangement fee of 850 euros i also had to get a bank survey so somebody had to survey the house now that is not required in italy if you're a cash buyer you don't have to have somebody survey your house but getting a mortgage you have to and that was 300 euros and then there is the purchase mortgage taxes so again the mortgage company that i went through the italian bank uh it's a one-off it's two percent of the loan amount of if you've registered it as a holiday home so that was roughly around a thousand euros for me and these are just one-off costs as far as the cost for the house finders so property organizers it was worth it for me so their mortgage fee to do the all the mortgage details for me and i mean they did everything for me with the mortgage was um roughly around three and a half thousand euros and then their finders fee so it's just and you don't uh we don't pay when you buy the house you're not paying it to the seller's agent they have to do that themselves but their finders fee was again um the same amount three and a half thousand euros so it's based on really the price of your house so you can see it's about three and a half percent but it was really worth it for me to be perfectly honest all that they did for me and especially during the pandemic you have no idea like usually you can close houses quite quickly i think around eight weeks but my house i put the offer in in february 2020 and i didn't close that house until the end of november 2020. so it took a very long time time because the world shut down so you can decide on really how expensive you want to make it by the building works that you do by if you're going to be installing air conditioning for example or you're going to be there over the winter months and be using uh heat because italy actually does get cold but overall um italy is affordable if you have a budget and you know what location you want to be in my house as i like to call it is la mia pico la casa which is basically my small house it's super cute it has two good sized bedrooms a rather large kitchen with spectacular views out out through the window it also has a sitting room and it's got quite a big bathroom but within that big bathroom i'm actually going to break through one of the walls into the shower room and make it into a big bathroom with a bath with a shower and of course a loo but the thing that really sold me on this house was definitely the terrace so when you walk all the way up to the top there is this wonderful terrace that has just spectacular views of figizano and of the apanini mountains and the background and also it just has this fantastic uh spot church spire and that lovely melody sound of the church bells ringing all day long which i'm certain i'm never going to get sick of [Music] so i hope that that helps you and i've been wanting to do this video for a really long time so i'm so excited that i was able to do it now i do hope that that helps you if you're looking to find that uh dream house in italy if i can do it you can do it

Channel: American Viscountess

Views: 1,231,195

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Id: YHQRVx42kVw

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021