Selling our House in Mendoza Argentina

Selling a house in Mendoza Argentina!

Our dream, Mendoza Argentina

We enjoyed every minutes of our time in Mendoza

Let start with a small historic; 

Our first visit in Argentina was in 2007, we loved it, so much that we went back in 2008 and we purchased a house in Mendoza, it was more like a condo on 2 levels, the location was fantastic close to everything, a small paradise.   

Our plan was to move to Argentina in 2011, and to become resident, but life decided otherwise, Marc my husband needed 2 surgeries, a second cervical spinal fusion and a lower back decompression, the last surgery was done in March 2014, and as soon as he felt better we took our flight tickets to Mendoza, leaving Calgary on August 15 landing in Mendoza August 16.

Marc last surgery

From Santiago to Mendoza

Arriving in Mendoza August 16, 2014

We were extremely happy to finally live our longtime dream.  

Few months later my father passed away and it was extremely painful not being close to family and especially close to my mom during that time, we had to rethink our decision to become resident, and took the decision to sell and come back home, it wasn’t easy and it took us almost 6 months to put it on the market.

Our first real estate agent, a reference from a friend accepted to work for us, I don’t think that he really wanted to sell our place, not expensive enough for him and his customers, all our communications were extremely difficult and we developed a lot of frustration, he didn’t answer our questions, telling us to ask someone else, and that’s exactly what we did, we let him go and hire another agent just before the Argentine Election, not the best time to sell, but we decided to get everything ready for January 2016.

Leandro Suarez our new agent understood our concerns and answer our questions, we had a perfect communication with him.

In January Leandro came with 3 customers in a single week, all interested, Leandro qualified every buyer carefully! 

The last visitors that week came on Friday and came back for a second visit on the following day “Saturday afternoon January 30”. 

They left with Leandro, and Leandro came back few minutes later to let us know that they were very interested to make an offer.

On Tuesday night Leandro came into our place and called the prospect and got a firm offer, exactly what we wanted.  We were very happy,  it was the beginning of a very stressful process.

We were expecting the first payment and the official offer to be Friday Feb. 3, we were on standby not knowing when it will happen, I cancelled everything for the following 2 weeks, the prospects offered to give us a deposit that we refused as we didn’t want to create a precedent and lock us on the value of the pesos early in the game, as the pesos like most of currency is very unstable even if our sell price was in US, we really didn't want to take a chance with the exchange rate.

 During our waiting time we book a meeting with Julian “Julian Sadofschi” , Julian represented us 8 years earlier when we purchased the place he also took possession for us, we needed his advice, and we wanted him to represent us again, “let me tell you that without Julian it wouldn’t been impossible to sell.

Julian accepted to work for us and represented us during the official offer meeting, where the buyer give the seller 50% of the money upfront.  It was Friday February 11, we got to the bank early, the first 50% was paid in pesos and the final payment in US$, Thursday night Julian contacted the buyer notary and give them the exchange rate for the next morning, it is very important to get the perfect exchange rate as the pesos like a lot of currency is instable. 

We got to the bank with Leandro, Julian, the buyers and their notary were already there.

Because the first payment was in pesos, that’s a lot of pesos that had to be counted, Julian and the buyer went with a bank rep. to do the first count with a machine, and put it in large red bag, after we all went to a room to count the remaining pesos. 

The notary asked us our passports, as she looked at them she put everything away and said, “I cannot do anything because this is not the same passports they used to buy, for sure it wasn’t the same passport, we bought in 2008 and we were in 2016, more than 8 years and Canadian passport used to be good only for 5 years they just changed it recently for 10 years. Remember to always keep your old passport!!! The funny thing is that we gave the copy of our new passports to Leandro and he gave a copy to the notary, but I guess nobody looked at them before the meeting.

Argentine Pesos

Julian took the problem into his hands, and discuss with the notary till she agreed to make the contract without the old passport, Julian has a long history with us, and knew that we can track our old passports from the notary that worked with us when we purchased the place.

We left Julian with all the pesos, and took a cab back home.  Julian called me later that afternoon to let me know that the transfer didn’t pass, stressful news.  At that point we had no choice and decided to open a US account at our bank in Canada, we worked with an amazing woman Sue Sydenham, we gave her authority to act for us a long time ago, only need a phone call and our US account was activated right away, Sue gave us all the info for the transfer, that I gave to Julian and this time everything when through, we still had to wait 5 days to see it in our account.

The following week we had a meeting with Julian and a lawyer to give him power of attorney we should have done it earlier, but we didn’t know. 

Julian went to AFIPP, that’s the tax men for Argentina, he found out that we didn’t pay our income tax for the last 8 years, we had no clue that we had to pay income tax on our asset “our house” but impossible to sell without paying 5 years back plus interest. Julian took care of everything hiring the accountant to do the work, we didn’t have to pay a fortune it was not even $2000US, but we were losing a lot of time and the delay for the second and final meeting was March 14, by the time we paid and Julian finally had all the paper in hand to go to AFIPP to get a certificate of retention, 

“you cannot sell a propriety in Argentina without a certificate of retention or non-retention, because we were not resident and didn’t want to buy another propriety we needed a certificate of retention".

When I said all the paper, I meant not only the income tax, but also all our bills for the past 8 years, we also ordered our marriage certificate in case we needed it.

Julian had the meeting with AFIPP March 1, only 2 weeks before the final meeting, not a lot of time, as AFIPP delay is up to 20 days to reach a decision, and they can request more documents after 10 days, and it can go on forever, if you don’t have someone to represent you with full power of attorney you are done, forget about selling and getting a certificate will be almost impossible. 

It was the longest 2 weeks of my life, we were not sure if it was possible to get the certificate in a such short time period even if Julian told us many times that we were going to get it on time. He also told us that we can take our flight back home as he had power of attorney and can finish the deal without us the same way he took possession for us 8 year earlier. 

We followed his advice, booked our flight back home and rented a place for 2 weeks.

Friday March 11 arrived, I couldn’t sleep at all that morning, too stress, it was our last day and we were still waiting for our certificate of retention, Julian texted me around 10 am, he was at AFIPP pushing for the certificate, he got it late afternoon, never been so relieve I could not believe it.

That weekend we pack all our belonging, a lot of extremely large suitcases, and Leandro gave us a lift to our temporary place. 

We had our final meeting on Monday March 14 at 6pm, we got there we were very relax, the notary began to read the contract and told us that she had to rush to finish everything on time as she got the certificate late Friday, and also told us that when she printed the contract she didn’t had enough of the special ink they used for this kind of legal paper and she was lucky that she could find some ink that day, and bla, bla, bla, she asked us to sign, even if in the background Julian was making a lot of gesture to stop us, yeap problem again! We were not supposed to sign, Julian was the one that had to sign the contract. 

She tried to reprint that last page without success, during that time Julian was trying to make her understand that is was ok to have more signatures, but she was not sure about it and didn’t want to make a mistake. 

After many phone calls from Julian and the notary, someone in the legal system called back and give the ok. It took almost an hour to solve this problem, and it was too late for Julian to do the transfer, but he told us not to worry that he was going to do it first thing next morning, and he did, and we waited another 5 days and everything went through. 

Our flight back was on March 26 landing in Montreal Easter day March 27,  before leaving we had to go to immigration to pay our fee, after being illegal for almost 2 years we had to pay around $60.00 to get out of the country. We also had to find a driver to get to the airport with all our luggage lucky for us one of the foreigner Shane Pape had a big truck and was free to drive us that morning.

Living in Argentina was an amazing experience, we loved it, if you have to sell your place in Argentina and have a lot of questions please contact me. 

A special thank you to Leandro for finding the perfect buyer, and to Julian to facilitate the process, as I wrote earlier even if you have a buyer, without someone like Julian who understand the full process, working with foreigner and AFIPP it is almost impossible to close the deal. I will give power of attorney to Julian again, if needed, he is the most honest person we ever meet.