Selling a flat, or finding one to buy, in Malé and Hulhumalé.
Two per cent of the price on completion, paid by the seller. A buyer pays us nothing.
Sales here move slowly and quietly. A large share of what changes hands never appears on any listing, which means the useful thing an agent has is not a website but a list of people who have told us what they are looking for. If you are buying, tell us and wait. Something suitable in a given ward at a given size may take four months to appear and then needs an answer in a week.
When you are selling we will give you a price with the comparable sales behind it, and we will tell you which of them we are less sure about, because the recorded numbers are not always the numbers that were paid and an agent who pretends otherwise is selling you certainty rather than a house.
On a purchase our job is to set out plainly what is being offered: who appears on the documents, whether everyone who needs to agree has agreed, what the position is on any borrowing secured against the property, what the building's own arrangements are for the roof, the tanks, the lift and the common stairs, and what the service contribution has actually been for the last two years rather than what it is supposed to be.
Then we stop, and a lawyer takes it. We are not lawyers, this is not legal advice, and we will not tell you a transfer is safe. What we will do is refuse to move the money before the answers are in, and say so in front of everybody, which is occasionally unpopular and has never once been wrong.
Staged payments are normal on a sale here. Every stage should be written down with its condition attached, and the last stage should be the one that matters.