Looking for an apartment to buy is never an easy task. It involves the daily decoding of advertisements in the newspaper, dozens of phone calls, and the even more arduous task of trekking all over the city to visit all the different possibilities.
Sometimes, however, it can feel like a treasure hunt. The experience is filled with emotion, with expectation, wonder, enchantment, disappointment and hope. There are a million reasons why any one home could not be the right one: “It’s too expensive;” “it’s rundown;” “the rooms are too small;” “it lacks natural light;” etcetera.
So why is it so difficult to find the right apartment? Are there really that many bad options out there?
More often than not, it’s not the market’s fault, it’s that of the advertisement. Many ads are misleading, embellishing information, or omitting even more important facts. Many buyers search for weeks, or even months, looking for a seemingly simple dream, such as one couple who searched for three months to find a two-bedroom apartment in Barrio Norte with a bathroom, utility room, and around 65 m2 total.
In the end, they contacted a real estate agent, because looking for Buenos Aires real estate on their own was simply too difficult. They saw apartment after apartment with structural problems, outdated fixtures, or simply in bad condition. And those that were presentable were ridiculously expensive. Old apartments were in need of some desperate help, and the newer units were extremely small.
The illusion is born in the advertisement, and usually causes buyers to lose precious search time, going to these apartments that are misrepresented on paper. Professionals are going to great lengths to help solve this problem, however.
For less than a year, the law 2340 has been in effect, applied by Cuciba (Colegio Unico de Corredores Inmobiliarios de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires), the authority on such matters. It helps regulate the ethics of the real estate market, and even has an official forum for buyers to leave complaints about misleading ads. The hope is that these sorts of ads will be completely weeded out within a year or two, and that the apartments that are catastrophic will be listed as such. The only problem is that some people complain for the sake of complaining, which means the complaints themselves need to be validated, and sometimes taken with a grain of salt.
Some agents strive to make sure the buyer has a good, realistic idea of what the property really is before even seeing it. Leticia Firpo, for example, lists expansive descriptions on her Web page, including maps, floor plans and photos. This not only saves the buyer time, but the seller and real estate agent, as well. In addition, as a matter of principal, her firm has quality control, and only lists properties that are actually sellable as-is.
Deception can take any sort of form, such as advertising a unit is 100 m2, when really it is 50 m2 with some improvised storage space making up the other 50 m2, or promising 2 bedrooms, when one is formed by some tall furniture in the living room, or even just lying about the overall quality.
Finding the perfect home can be demanding, but it can be done, and steps are being taken to make it more painless for everyone involved.