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.
