How to Read a Nota Simple: The Fields and the Four Dates That Decide the Deal

Most guides to the nota simple stop at the same place: they tell you it has a description of the property, the owner, and a section called *cargas*. That is the easy half. The half that actually decides whether you sign is knowing whether each charge listed is still alive — because several of them expire on their own, on a fixed clock, and a registry page will happily show you a charge that stopped having any effect years ago.

So before the field-by-field walkthrough, here are the four dates worth writing on a sticky note. An anotación preventiva de embargo (a court-ordered seizure note) expires four years from the date of the annotation, automatically and *ipso iure*, under article 86 of the Ley Hipotecaria — and it can only be extended if the court order is filed *before* it lapses (elnotario.es). A nota de afección fiscal expires five years from its date, under article 122.4 of the ITPAJD Regulation, or earlier if the tax receipt is produced (Consultax). A mortgage with no cancellation filed can be struck out for lapse under article 82.5 LH after twenty years of prescription plus one more year with nothing registered (elnotario.es). And an asiento de presentación — a document queued but not yet registered — runs for 60 working days (Notarios y Registradores).

Read the charges section with those four numbers in your head and half the panic disappears — and the other half becomes a specific question you can put to the seller in writing.

What the document is, and what it is not

A nota simple is an extract of what the Land Registry holds on one property: who owns it, in what share, what it is, and what encumbers it. It costs 9.02 € plus VAT at the official tariff, roughly 10.91 € all in; there is also an *online continuous consultation* variant at 12.03 € plus VAT that lets you watch the property's status for ten days, which is the one to use between signing a deposit contract and the notary date (Legia, Registradores).

What it is not: proof. The nota simple has purely informative value. If you need a document the Registry certifies as accurate — for litigation, for a foreign bank, for an inheritance abroad — you need a *certificación registral*, not a nota.

Read it in this order

1. Registry, finca number and CRU. The *Código Registral Único* (also called IDUFIR) is a 14-digit number that stays with the property forever, through every sale (Arquitasa). Do not confuse it with the *referencia catastral*, which has 20 characters and belongs to the Cadastre, a different administration. If you are cross-checking two documents, match on the CRU — addresses get rewritten, the CRU does not.

2. Description of the property. Type, address, boundaries, surface. Two traps here. The registry surface and the cadastral surface often disagree, sometimes by a lot, and the registry one is the legal reference for what you are buying. And a *finca* is a legal unit: an entry that mentions a parking space or storage room as an annex of the same finca is a different situation from two separate fincas that must be transferred separately.

3. Titularidad. Names, ID numbers, share of ownership, and — crucially — the *title of acquisition* and its date. Bare ownership split from usufruct, a share held 50/50 by an ex-couple, or property acquired within a marriage under a specific regime all change who has to sign at the notary. If any of the current owners is a company, the person appearing to sign will need to prove they have power to do so.

4. Cargas y gravámenes. This is the section everyone reads first and interprets worst. Take it charge by charge and, for each, write down three things: what kind of charge it is, the date it was entered, and the amount it secures. Then apply the clocks above.

5. Asientos de presentación pending. Sometimes the nota ends with a line saying a document is filed and pending qualification. That is a change on its way in that the charges section does not yet reflect. If you see one, ask what it is before you transfer any money.

The charges, and what each one actually means for you

Mortgage. The most common and the least alarming, because it is normally cancelled with the sale proceeds at the notary's table. What matters is not that it exists but the *outstanding* balance — the registry shows the secured maximum, including interest and costs, not the current debt. Ask the bank for a certificate of outstanding balance dated close to the signing.

Anotación preventiva de embargo. A creditor has gone to court. Check the date: past four years without a registered extension and it is legally spent, even if it is still printed. Within the window, it is a serious problem — the property can be auctioned to satisfy the debt, and the charge follows the property, not the seller.

Nota de afección fiscal. This appears when the previous transfer may not have paid enough transfer tax. The buyer's exposure is *subsidiary* and limited to the property itself: the tax authority must first declare the main debtor insolvent and issue a formal derivation of liability. The practical move is to ask the seller for a copy of the ITP or ISD self-assessment from when they acquired, and if the numbers look thin, retain part of the price or take a guarantee until the five years run out.

Condición resolutoria. Typically a deferred-payment sale: if the previous buyer stops paying, the previous seller can undo the sale. Check whether it has been cancelled; if not, it needs to be dealt with before completion, not after.

Servidumbres and statements of *obra nueva*. A right of way or a shared access does not usually kill a deal, but it changes what the buyer can build or fence. An *obra nueva* declared "en construcción" and never converted to "terminada" is a paperwork gap you inherit.

Limitations from public subsidy or protected housing. VPO-type restrictions cap the resale price and can require administrative authorisation. This one silently breaks deals late, because it changes the price, not the paperwork.

The mistakes that cost money

Using a nota that is too old. There is no legal expiry date on a nota simple, but a document more than a few weeks old may simply not show what was filed last Tuesday. For a purchase, refresh it days before the notary — not months.

Reading the mortgage figure as the debt. The registered figure is the maximum secured responsibility. Treating it as the amount to pay off has led plenty of buyers to structure a deal around the wrong number.

Assuming the nota covers everything. It does not show unpaid *comunidad de propietarios* fees, unpaid IBI, whether there are tenants or occupants inside, energy certificates or planning infractions that were never registered. Those come from other documents — the community's certificate of no debt, the IBI receipt, the cadastral file. If you are assembling that set for a deal, the document checklist for a deposit contract covers what to collect and in what order.

Filing it and never extracting the data. In an agency this is the quiet cost. One nota is a five-minute read; forty a month, each one re-typed into a CRM, a valuation sheet and a contract draft, is a job. We put numbers on that in how many hours a month your agency loses to paperwork.

When you read twenty of these a week

The reading skill above does not scale by hiring. What scales is having the fields — CRU, finca number, owner, ID, share, surface, charges with their dates — pulled out of the PDF automatically and landed in a spreadsheet, so the human only reviews the charges section and the dates. That is exactly the workflow described in extracting data from a nota simple automatically, and the same pipeline handles the identification documents you collect alongside it, covered in automating KYC and client ID over WhatsApp.

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