It’s been an emotional rollercoaster – and now a mountain to climb…
Newly retired policeman Dwayne (Doc) and Lucia Nurse are an adventurous couple from Exeter who love travelling and climbing. The couple, who both decided to retire at 50, went out filming to Malaga province with Laura Hamilton in December 2021 and after falling in love with property five, events began to take an unusual twist.
As viewers will have seen, as Lucia and Doc were about to make an offer, Laura told the couple that she’d just found out that an offer had already been accepted on the property by another member of the Spanish family that owned it. Yet a little while later this offer fell through, and it was reported that the couple had put in an offer and there was a success in the end…
About the episode
But the couple discovered that buying a rural standalone property can be less than straightforward. “We loved the area and the property and when we got the call a few weeks later that the other buyer didn’t have the funds to proceed, we put in an offer of £98k,” says Lucia, 51, a former store manager for GAP, before being made redundant in 2020.
“Yet when we started asking questions of the owner they started being evasive. We decided that we wouldn’t buy a place in the UK without having a survey done so we arranged for one to be done.”
The couple went over to Spain three times trying to progress the sale and get answers to questions raised by the architect who did the visual survey that cost £250. Unfortunately the vendors were unable to produce any documents to prove that the first and second storeys, and the roof-top plunge pool, had planning permission.
“The pool had been long emptied, and we didn’t even know if filling it with water would make the whole roof terrace collapse,” says Lucia. “Had the footings been dug deep enough to support all the floors? We just couldn’t take the risk of not knowing.”
With a heavy heart the couple had to walk away from the property in March without losing any more money. “We’d gone through such a period of highs and lows that we needed to take a break. Our early retirement plan was all about going off travelling – so we went into overdrive and booked lots of flights. We’ve been to Turkey, India, Borneo, Malaysia and Thailand,” says Lucia, just off a flight from the latter.
"Our new plan is to go to Nepal and Everest Base Camp in February and then climb Mont Blanc in June. Then when we’re back we can sit down and have another go at buying in Spain,” she says, adding that they AirBnB their Devon home to help fund their travels.
Doc adds that as things have turned out, it might have been for the best. “With the world economy as it is, and the energy crisis, it feels like it might have been an escape, as running two properties would be expensive,” he says. “But we feel that the TV filming was an amazing experience and was really helpful in teaching us about buying in Spain. I think the area around Alora is for us, even if that property wasn’t.”
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