Buying and selling a home is not simple: it is a procedure full of procedures where any detail must be looked at with a magnifying glass. A common problem arises when the owner wants to process the change of ownership of drinking water, gas, electricity or telephone supplies.
Non-payment of bills from previous tenants or feeling deceived by your marketing company are common situations in this sector, highlights the CEO of the real estate services technology company Housell, Guillermo Llibre. "The energy sector is the worst valued by Spaniards according to the CNMC Household Panel, so the concern about getting a good rate without “traps” is something recurrent in the market," he adds.
So how do I know if my new home is full of debt? What do I need to change the power supply holder? How long do I have to wait to make that change? These are some of the most common questions when carrying out this procedure.
Before making a change of ownership, it is essential to know the CUPS or the Universal Codes of the Supply Point. These are numbers that supply distributors assign to homes to identify them. It is essential information to know the status of pending payments for our future home, as well as to review the power and the contracted rate. In turn, the executive director of Housell points out the importance of making a prior estimate of energy consumption.
To estimate the end-of-month expense for our services, you need to have the following information on hand: name of the new and previous owner, contracted light power, supply address, bank account, contract number and the Unified Code of the Supply Point (CUPS). An easy way to gather them is through a previous invoice from the seller.
With this information we can now proceed to calculate the expense forecast. There are different ways to do it. On the one hand, there are electricity consumption calculators or estimation applications, both of which are the simplest methods. If not, we always have the option of measuring the power of each device and multiplying it by the operating time. The result will be the energy consumed per device, which must then be multiplied by the price of the energy that we have contracted: this is how the cost per household electrical device is obtained.
Remember that if the power of the contracted light does not adapt to your needs you can always change it.
The supply distributors are the owners of the electrical infrastructure: they are in charge of distributing energy, of breakdowns in the electrical network and of giving the meter reading to the marketers. The latter are the companies that buy energy from the former and charge it to the customer. The distributors are delimited by zones, but the marketing companies can be freely chosen by the user.
The sector of electricity market suppliers raises suspicions because most of the time the consumer feels that they are paying more than necessary. A survey carried out by the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) reveals that 32% of users are dissatisfied with their gas company for "incorrect billing due to a bad consumption estimate" and 19% complain about a lack of information. In these cases, Okify and Housell insist on the importance of choosing a good marketer: "Many times the marketer refers procedures to the distributor and vice versa, which causes irritation and loss of time for the customer," they comment.
Before signing a contract, it is important to request the subrogation of the previous one to separate ourselves from possible debts that the supply may have. With this management, the consumer will not have any legal responsibility for the supply prior to the date on which the purchase and sale contract was signed. And as always: time is money. The modification of the ownership of the supply must be done as soon as possible, after completing the signature before a notary and registering the property in the Property Registry.
When you have a purchase and sale ahead of you and the derived procedures that it entails, it is easy to think that you have to be an expert in legal issues. Not at all, says Guillermo Llibre: "Nowadays, with the information we have on the Internet and the advice from distributors, it is not necessary to be a professional, the important thing is to know that they are necessary processes and manage them before they become in trouble".
