If I buy a house in Nicaragua, do I need to hire an attorney?

• from US $1 to $50,000 the tax will be the 1%;
• from $50,001 to $100,000, is the 2%;
• from $100,001 to  200,000 is the 3%;
• and from $200,001 to up the tax is 4% of the property.

When buying a property in Nicaragua, I highly recommend hiring an attorney to take the existing title and go to the National Registry of the city in which you are buying. The National Registry is a large room with books that are about 2 square feet wide and 4 inches thick.
 
The Spaniards have always been very good at recording history. You can go back to the Spanish archives in cities in Spain where every single cask, hogshead, or bottle of mineral oil is cataloged on boats and...

When buying a property in Nicaragua, I highly recommend hiring an attorney to take the existing title and go to the National Registry of the city in which you are buying. The National Registry is a large room with books that are about 2 square feet wide and 4 inches thick.
 
The Spaniards have always been very good at recording history. You can go back to the Spanish archives in cities in Spain where every single cask, hogshead, or bottle of mineral oil is cataloged on boats and ships that were sailing the oceans in the 1400s, the 1500s and the 1600s so that when someone finds a ship at the bottom of the sea, they know what is going to be on that ship or they know what should have been on that ship. My point is, when a property was sold in the 1600s in Granada and sold again in the 1700s and again in 1720 and again, until the present time, all of those deeds have been recorded. You can go back 200 years and see every single time that property has been recorded.
 
When First American Title was here, they required 70 to 100 years of records depending on where the property was. They required 70 years of title records for city properties and 100 years for beach and lakeside properties. They wanted to see who bought it and sold it and when all that happened. They also check if there were liens on it for the last 70 years. All of that documentation exists in the form of longhand on these giant books in the National Registry. The books, the pages, and the entries are numbered and all those numbers exist on your title.
 
So if you want to buy a property in Nicaragua, it’s preferable to hire an attorney to go back to the registry and get the information you need. Within 24 hours, she will have had the time to write a report on how many times that property was bought, sold, liened against, or paid off. If there is anything outstanding on that property, such as a lien or a loan, it will be registered on that book of registry at the city in Nicaragua in which you are looking to buy the property. It is like title search but there is no insurance on that. If your attorney makes a mistake, you could be in trouble.  This is not a problem very often, however, because It is actually very clear in the registry books what happened to a piece of property for hundreds of years.