What to check before you pay a deposit

Why the checks come before you pay a deposit

Before you pay a deposit you are a prospective buyer with all your options open. Afterwards you have money in someone else's hands and a set of conditions that either were written down or were not. Almost every difficult story starts with a payment made before a check that would have taken a week.

This is not a reason to move slowly on everything. It is a reason to move slowly on this one step. Here is what to establish first.

Who you are paying, and whether they can sell

Establish the identity of the party you are paying and their relationship to the unit. If it is an individual, does the name match the document for the unit. If it is a company, who signs for it and on what basis. If it is a representative, ask for the document that gives them authority, and have your lawyer read its scope rather than accepting a summary.

A person can be entirely genuine and still lack authority to sell the particular unit at the particular price. Those are separate questions and both need an answer.

Which document exists, and whether it matches

Ask which form of documentation the seller holds, and ask to see it. Then reconcile it against the unit: building, floor, unit number, area, and any terrace or garden. If the document describes something other than what you saw, stop there and get that resolved before anything else.

Ask how the seller acquired the unit and what documents the previous steps. A chain with a missing link is the problem to find now. Photographs of documents forwarded over a messaging app establish that something exists in some form and very little else, so treat them as a starting point for your lawyer rather than a result.

What comes attached to the unit

Ask what is outstanding. Unpaid compound service charges, utility arrears, and unfinished developer obligations can follow a unit rather than the person who ran them up, and whether they do is a question for your lawyer about your specific case. Ask for a statement from the compound management and current utility readings and balances.

For a unit still under construction, ask what the developer still owes and where that is written. A verbal assurance about a completion date is not a term of a contract.

What the reservation actually buys

• The exact unit taken off the market, described the same way it appears in the documents.
• A defined period, with an end date, and what happens when it ends.
• The conditions under which the payment is returnable, and the ones under which it is not.
• What the payment counts towards if you proceed, and how it appears in the contract.
• The price and currency it holds, and whether anything can change before signing.

If none of that is written down, what you have bought is goodwill. Goodwill is worth something and it is not worth a payment.

Where the money goes

Establish in whose name the receiving account is held and whether that name is the party in the reservation document. Ask what receipt you will get, who signs it, and what it says the money is for. Confirm account details through a channel you initiated yourself.

A reservation paid into a personal account against a verbal promise is the arrangement to refuse. The reason is mechanical rather than moral: if the payment is not tied by a document to a named party and a described unit, there is nothing to point at later. Buyers coming from Europe often look for the equivalent of a notary client account or an escrow arrangement; ask your lawyer what is available for your transaction, and what stands in for it if nothing is.

What Dommare does on this step

Your enquiry becomes a lead handled by a Dommare agent, so you are dealing with a named counterparty rather than an anonymous phone number, and you do not have to reach the owner yourself. The listing's Passport shows which document checks have been received and reviewed for that unit, so you can see the state of the paperwork before you commit.

Owner listings are not published automatically. Publication is a staff action taken after a moderation decision, and the four states a listing carries — availability, moderation, publication and verification per check — are kept separate rather than collapsed into one badge.

The next step

Take a unit you are close to reserving and ask a Dommare advisor for the document checks currently open on it, then send the same list to your own lawyer before you transfer anything. Two hours spent on that list is the cheapest part of the transaction.