Notes from a moving box still half full. A plain-spoken reflection on what actually surprised me.
I have spent more than twenty-five years in Norwegian real estate. I have written about it, talked about it, and made most of the mistakes worth making at least once. So when I started spending serious time on the Costa del Sol, I assumed the transfer would be mostly mechanical — same instincts, warmer weather, a few new acronyms to learn.
I was wrong about enough of it that I think it is worth writing down honestly, partly for buyers who imagine the move is simpler than it is, and partly because I would rather you learn it from this page than from an expensive afternoon at a notary.
These are the things I got wrong.
I thought Marbella was a market. It is a dozen.
In Norway I am used to thinking in cities and neighbourhoods. I arrived treating “Marbella” as a single market with a single mood, the way you might talk about Oslo west versus east.
That lasted about a week. What I found instead was a coast of micro-markets that behave almost independently of one another — the beachfront communities, the golf valleys, the gated hillside enclaves, the new-build corridors heading toward Estepona, the old town that has nothing to do with any of them. A price trend in one says very little about the next ridge over. Two villas that look comparable on paper can sit in completely different demand pools because one has a sea view and a 24-hour gate and the other has neither. I had to unlearn the habit of generalising and start learning the place street by street. I am still doing it.
I thought my network would simply travel with me.
I have a good name in Norway. I assumed it would convert directly — that the trust I had built over decades would arrive in my luggage and unpack itself.
It does help. But trust is local, and it has to be rebuilt in the place where the work happens. The lawyer who is brilliant in Oslo is not the one who knows the Benahavís planning office. The relationships that matter here — with the right abogado, the right gestor, the photographers, the people who actually know which villa is quietly coming to market before it is listed — those I had to earn from zero, in a second and third language, the same way everyone does. My reputation opened the first door. It did not walk me through the building.
I underestimated how international and how cash-driven the top of the market is.
In Norway, financing is woven into almost every purchase, and the conversation is shaped by it. Here, in the prime segment, a large share of buyers pay cash, and they come from everywhere — Sweden, the Nordics, Germany and the wider DACH region, the Middle East, the Americas. I knew this intellectually. I did not feel it until I sat in the room.
It changes the rhythm. A cash buyer with conviction moves fast, and the best-located homes do not wait politely for a financing condition to clear. It also changes the competition: you are not bidding against the local market, you are bidding against the world’s appetite for this particular coast. For a Norwegian buyer used to a more orderly, more financed process at home, that pace is the single biggest adjustment.
I trusted the asking prices for about a day.
I am embarrassed by how long it took me to internalise this one, given my background. The price on the portal is the start of a conversation, and the gap between what is advertised and what actually transacts is wider — and less consistent — than I expected. Some sellers are anchored to a number from a year ago; some agents list optimistically to win the mandate; some genuinely scarce homes sell above the asking price the same week.
The only reliable guide is the registered, transacted data and a feel for the specific micro-market — which loops straight back to my first mistake. You cannot value a home here from a screen. You have to know the street.
I assumed the bureaucracy would behave like ours.
Norwegian property administration is, for all its irritations, fast and digital and predictable. I expected something similar with a Mediterranean accent.
What I found is a process that is perfectly navigable but rewards patience and the right local hands — NIE numbers, the nota simple, licences of first occupation, the valor de referencia that can quietly set your tax base above the price you negotiated, the timeline that stretches when you assumed it would snap shut. None of it is a problem if you respect it and staff it properly with people who do this every day. All of it becomes a problem if you assume your home-market instincts will carry you through. I assumed. They didn’t.
I misread the rhythm of the year.
In Norway the property year has a shape I could read in my sleep — when listings come, when buyers move, when everything goes quiet. I assumed the Costa del Sol would have its own version of the same calendar and that I would pick it up quickly.
It does have a rhythm, but it is not the one I expected, and it is driven by people who live somewhere else. The market breathes to the timetable of buyers flying in from the north — viewing trips clustered around school holidays and long weekends, decisions made in concentrated bursts rather than the steady trickle I was used to, and a summer that is busy with visitors but not always with serious transactions. Reading that rhythm wrongly in the first months meant I occasionally pushed when I should have waited and waited when I should have moved. You learn it by living through a full cycle, not by reading about it, and I am only most of the way through my first.
What I got right, almost by accident
I should be fair to myself about one thing, because it turned out to matter more than anything on the list above.
I came in believing the relationship was worth more than the transaction — that the job is to represent the buyer’s interest patiently and honestly, even when that means telling someone the house they have fallen in love with is the wrong house. I half-expected that to read as naïve in a market with this much money moving through it.
It has been the opposite. In a place where so many buyers feel, rightly or wrongly, that everyone in the room is incentivised to make the sale, simply being the person on their side of the table is rarer and more valuable than I assumed. The instinct that I worried would be a weakness has been the thing that opened the most doors. “Relationships over transactions” was a tagline I believed in before I moved. Six months in, it is the only part of the plan I would not change.
Where that leaves me
The box is still half unpacked, and I suspect I will write a sequel to this in another six months admitting to a new set of mistakes. That is fine. The point of moving was never to arrive already knowing the place. It was to learn it properly, the way I learned the Norwegian market — slowly, on the ground, one street and one relationship at a time.
If you are a Nordic buyer reading this and thinking the move looks simple, it isn’t. But it is worth it, and most of the traps are avoidable if you go in clear-eyed and well-represented. That, more or less, is the job.
Pål Restad is co-founder of Tribeca Living Nordics. These are personal reflections; nothing here is tax, legal or investment advice.