How it's done

I was asked by a friend how to find out the owner of a ruin in a village outside of Gois.
I first went onto Googleearth and took a picture of the village to identify the house. Along with this picture I went to the Financas " tax office ". Then of to the conservatoriea a department where house records are kept. At the Financas we identified the location of the house and the name of the owner. Then with this information we went to the conservatoriea and here we found the date the current owner brought the house it was 2005 and then the price paid for the house.

As the owner has two Christian names it was a little easier to use Gensreunited.com. It was lucky that only one person in the UK has the same names but as someone had started a family tree to get any further information you need to contact the person who has started the family tree. This I did but got nowhere no reply to my enquiry for further information. Dead end hell no.

Back to the Financas and conservatoriea when we found out the spouse of the present owner. Sadly the owner was not listed on Gensreunited.com so a look on good old Facebook and guess what we found the spruce. All it took was a message to the spouse and not long later we had a reply. It turns out the spouse was at the village in question only last week and saw the damage caused by the roof falling in.

After a couple of weeks my friend and the owner agreed a price  and shortly the ruin will be sold to my friend and that's a good end to a lengthy process.

If you are a resourceful kind of person and you find the house you want just by looking around the local towns or villages then why go to an estate agent. You may not pay his fees but in reality you do because the owner has to pay the fees but he just puts the price of the property up to cover the fees. So find the house of your dreams and find the owner you could get a bargain because by selling direct the owner doesn't have to pay estate agent fees so you could get the house for less. Remember estate agents fees here in Portugal are about 5 to 6%  and that can add up to a lot.

So like I did with my car I didn't listen to others I did it myself. When you are retired you have the time so if this post helps you great it was worth me recalling how I did it.