How to Check Okupa Risk Before You Buy in Spain

A buyer who has done everything right can still complete on an occupied flat. The nota simple came back clean, the price was good, the photos were bright and empty, and nobody thought to ask the one question the registry cannot answer: is anyone living in it?

The registry records ownership and charges. It does not record occupation. No Spanish public register tells you who is physically inside a property, so occupation risk has to be established by inspection, by the paper trail of daily life, and by asking the right questions before you sign. None of that is difficult. It is just not automatic.

These are the seven checks worth running, in the order that costs you least to abandon the purchase.

What the nota simple does and does not tell you

The nota simple is an extract from the Registro de la Propiedad and it is genuinely essential. It gives you the registered owner, the description of the property, and the charges: mortgages, liens, embargoes, easements. You can obtain it through the registrars' own service at Registradores de España.

What it will not give you is possession. A property can be registered to a willing seller, free of charges, and still have three people living in it who have never paid for it. The registry is silent on that, by design.

So treat a clean nota simple as a necessary condition and never as an answer to the occupation question. What it can hint at: an embargo, a foreclosure annotation or a bank as registered owner all raise the base rate, because repossessed and institutionally held stock is exactly where usurpación concentrates.

Visit the property, physically, and insist on going inside

This sounds too obvious to write down, and it is the check most often skipped by foreign buyers who purchase remotely.

Go in. Not the portal, not the landing, inside the actual flat. If the seller or the agent offers reasons why an interior viewing is not possible, that is not an inconvenience to be worked around. That is the finding.

While you are there, look for the signs that a place is lived in by someone other than the owner: changed or added locks, a reinforced door, mail piling up under the door rather than in the box, furniture that does not match the listing photos, or a meter cupboard that has been tampered with. In a block, the state of the door relative to its neighbours is informative on its own.

If you genuinely cannot travel, send someone with a duty to you. Not the selling agent, who is paid by the other side.

Ask the comunidad de propietarios

The community of owners is the single best source of information about a building, and it costs nothing to ask.

Request a certificate of outstanding community fees, which you need anyway before completion, and then speak to the administrator directly. Ask whether the flat has been occupied, whether there are ongoing incidents in the building, and whether other units have had problems. Administrators know. They deal with the complaints.

Ask also about the building's own history: a block with several bank owned or long empty units behaves differently from one that is fully owner occupied. In Spain the risk clusters at building level far more than at city level.

Check the utilities

Live utility contracts are a strong signal of occupation, and dormant ones are a strong signal of a long empty property.

Ask the seller for recent electricity and water invoices. Two patterns are worth noticing. Consumption on a property that is supposed to be empty means someone is there. And a supply that was cut long ago means the flat has been sitting empty, which is the condition that attracts occupation in the first place, and may also mean reconnection costs and an inspection before you can use it.

Where a meter has been bypassed or tampered with, treat that as evidence of unauthorised occupation until proven otherwise, and expect the supplier to require regularisation.

Ask about empadronamiento

The padrón municipal is the town hall's population register. People living in a property, including without title, may be registered at that address, because registration is tied to residence rather than to ownership.

You cannot pull a stranger's data from the padrón; it is protected. But the seller can request a certificado de empadronamiento showing who is registered at the address, and a seller with nothing to hide will produce it. A refusal is informative.

Be aware of what registration does and does not mean. Being on the padrón does not create a right to occupy. It does, however, tend to make removal slower and messier, and it is often the first thread that reveals a situation the seller described as vacant.

Establish whether anyone in the property is legally vulnerable

This is the check that most changes the outcome, and it is the one buyers almost never run.

Where occupants include minors, dependants or households classed as vulnerable, social services get involved and courts move more carefully. The 2026 picture shifted here: Real Decreto-ley 2/2026, which would have extended eviction suspension for vulnerable households to the end of 2026, was published in February and then repealed by Congress on 26 February 2026. The blanket suspension lapsed, but the underlying judicial caution did not disappear with it, and the pending anti occupation bill itself provides for referral to social services where minors or vulnerable people are affected.

The practical rule: a property occupied by a family with children is a materially different purchase from one occupied by an adult with no protected status, whatever the statute says on any given month. Establish which one you are looking at before you price the risk.

Know which offence would apply to your situation

Your recovery route depends on a legal category that is fixed by how the property is used, not by how aggrieved you feel.

Occupation of a dwelling in actual use is allanamiento de morada under article 202 of the Penal Code, punished with six months to two years in prison. Occupation of a property that is not someone's dwelling is usurpación under article 245.2, punished with a fine of three to six months. Since 3 April 2025 both can be tried through the fast track procedure, following Ley Orgánica 1/2025.

The civil route matters more for most individual owners. Ley 5/2018 gives occupants five days to produce a title justifying possession; if they cannot, the court orders immediate delivery of possession with no appeal. It is available to natural persons who own or legitimately possess the property, which covers a typical foreign buyer, and not to large corporate landlords.

Our companion article explains what the law actually changed by 2026, including why the 24 hour eviction you may have read about is a bill and not a rule, and why there is no 48 hour police deadline.

If you are buying a repossessed or long empty property

Bank owned and long vacant stock is priced below the market for a reason, and occupation risk is a large part of that reason. National figures bear it out: of the 14,875 allanamiento and usurpación offences reported in 2025 according to the Ministerio del Interior, the great majority are usurpación of empty or institutionally held property rather than break ins to occupied homes.

If you buy in this segment, do three additional things. Contract for delivery vacant and free of occupants, with the obligation on the seller, verified on the day. Do not accept completion against a promise to clear the property afterwards. And plan for the first ninety days: a property that stands empty immediately after purchase is at its most exposed, so line up the locks, an alarm or an insurance product before you hold the keys, not after.

What this means for buyers

Occupation is not a national lottery. It is concentrated in specific regions, specific buildings and one specific condition: an empty property that looks like it will stay empty.

Two things to do before you make an offer:

1. Get inside the property and get the community administrator on the phone. Between them they answer the occupation question better than any document you can buy.
2. Ask the seller for a recent utility invoice and a certificado de empadronamiento for the address. Both are easy for an honest seller and awkward for a dishonest one, which is exactly what makes them useful.

If your paperwork is not yet in place, start with the Spanish NIE number guide; if you plan to let the property out, the rules moved recently and the tourist rental registry ruling is worth reading first. Running the listing through AiMYNDi's property analysis pulls the registry charges and legal flags for the specific address in under a minute, so the questions you take to the viewing are the right ones.