BestFSBOGuide.com team
Elena Marsh
Europe research editor
Twenty-one countries, Portugal through Ukraine. I have lived in three of them. Each guide comes from that country's own registry, notary chamber and tax office.
Outside Cologne a Notar read a contract out loud to both parties for forty minutes. No skimming. My friend listened to it the way you would listen to a bus timetable. A month earlier I had watched someone in England sell a house by email without meeting anyone involved.
So I don’t edit Europe. There is a Belgian process that changes when you cross into Flanders, and a German one where nobody signs until the reading is finished, and nineteen more after that. Transfer tax in Spain is set by the autonomous community and in Switzerland by the canton, so a single national figure is already wrong on the day you publish it. I won’t sign off on a country guide that can’t tell me which office records the transfer and at what moment ownership actually moves, which nearly everywhere here is the registry entry and not the signing.
Nobody sends a memo when a tax band changes, and nobody sends it in English. I found out Portugal’s had moved because a reader’s arithmetic didn’t match mine and she was right. Fixing ours took an hour. I thought about it for a week.
A little more about Elena
Bristol, then Berlin and Ghent in my twenties, and Lisbon since 2018. Before this I translated technical manuals. Forklifts, mostly. My German and Portuguese are good, my Ukrainian is not, and I sing second alto in a chamber choir. We are good.
Areas of focus
- Each country read from its own registry, notary body and tax authority
- Transfer tax bands move without announcement, so I recheck the twenty-one on a rolling schedule
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