Advice needed: How to connect off-market Spanish land with international capital?

[Lluis Navarro Rico]

Hi everyone,

I am based in Spain (Valencia/Alicante region), acting as a direct sourcer for local landowners—mostly probate situations or tired landlords who refuse to work with local agencies due to high fees.

Because I am local, I’m getting access to off-market inventory solely through referrals and trust.

Most of the opportunities coming across my desk are for land/development. The issue is that local capital is currently quite constrained for raw land, even though the development margins are strong. The deals are essentially "stuck" locally because banks here aren't lending easily on land.

I want to build a digital presence to reach international demand that is looking for this specific exposure.

For those of you sourcing deals cross-border: Where should I be focusing my efforts to find serious partners? Is it better to build a personal brand on LinkedIn, or are there specific platforms where international developers look for land?

[Mike Lambert]

Lluis, it seems to me that, a s in any such situation, you'd want to know who could be interesting in buying what you have to sell (raw land in that area). So we're talking speculators who'd want to flip or developers who'd want to build.

As an international investor investing in Spain, I'm going to share you my perspective and what I'd be doing in the situation. Here are some pointers:

1. I, as an international investor in Spain and the other foreign investors I know only invest in Spain because we can benefit from your very low mortgage interest rates and the potential capital appreciation of your brick and mortar so I'd never consider raw land, unless I want to do my own development. Even in one's own country, buying raw material is extremely speculative so I'd be even less temped to do it overseas and certainly not if I have to put up most of the capital.

2. I doubt that I could convince any serious foreigner who doesn't already has the appetite to develop in Spain to buy raw land there.

3. If my deals are good, I imagine they'd be scooped up by Spanish developers. If it's not good enough for them, why should it be good enough for an international developer?

So, it seems to me that my best buyers would be the Spanish developers and I'd check who's developing in the area because they generally want to do multiple projects in the same area for obvious reasons.

You mentioned that local capital is currently quite constrained for raw land. I'm very surprised. I invest in the Costa del Sol and I've never seen that many cranes. There's a huge amount of Spanish money investing there and I'd have thought, logically and because of what I've read and heard, that it's the same in the Valencia/Alicante region. If you confirm that it's not the case and I'm an international developer, I would ask myself why I should be developing in the Valencia/Alicante region when the smart money, aka the Spanish developers, invest massively in the Costa del Sol instead.

The thing is that the Spanish developers might not need you to find land and might even have access to the same deals as you. If that's the case, I understand your idea of focusing on foreigners instead. However, if you do have access to land before the Spanish developers, they might be your ideal client. As you mentioned, their margins are quite fat so they should have no problem paying you if you bring them a good piece of land at a time they themselves don't have direct access to it.