We lost £200,000 on our Spanish dream home to robbers, cowboy builders and red tape: Brits, 71, return to Britain after ‘expensive nightmare’… but they’re still being chased for money by authorities

A British couple who were forced to leave Spain after their retirement dream turned into a nightmare have told how cowboy builders and bureaucracy left them more than £200,000 out of pocket.

Phil and Anne Bulman, both 71, moved to the Costa Blanca in 2004 when Phil retired after three decades in the Merchant Navy.

The pair sold the house and bought their dream home in Almoradi, looking forward to spending their retirement in the sun after years of anticipation.

But 20 years later, the couple are back in Britain, having lost huge sums of money after falling foul of robbers, fraudulent employees and red tape.

Phil says the couple put in a whopping £374,000 to build their retirement paradise, but have only managed to recoup £161,000 – a loss of £213,000.

‘We’ve all had ideas about that idyllic dream, but it turns out not to be that way.

“For us it was an expensive nightmare,” he complained.

Phil and Anne selected a beautiful plot between orange and lemon groves almost twenty years ago.

They had their dream home built on it for £230,000.

They then paid £18,500 to build a swimming pool and terraces, and added a second plot of land on their plot at an additional cost for their daughter, who came to join them.

All the work was done by the same construction company and Phil was assured that all the paperwork was in order.

But several years later they had to call in the builders again to solve a problem with the pool.

Inspectors visiting work on a neighboring property then dropped by to see what was going on – and Phil claims they quickly concluded the extra house and pool were illegal.

Phil said inspectors told him the works would be destroyed unless he paid a hefty £30,000 fine – and the builders were nowhere to be seen.

‘It was horrible. We trusted the builder and did not have the lawyer look at all the documents.

“We showed them all the builder’s paperwork and they said it was all nonsense.

‘Because the money was owed to the tax authorities, they just emptied our account – £10,000… Then the builder just disappeared.

‘He had built a few houses nearby and left us all with water tanks, without electricity… We spent a lot of money on lawyers trying to connect the water line.”

Dismayed, the couple moved back to Britain because they needed more money, and Phil took a job as a ship inspector.

They rented out their Spanish home and rented it out in Britain, but Phil said their tenant stopped paying in 2015 and told them to leave in a hurry.

The couple then returned to Spain to discover they had been robbed, Phil claims.

He said: ‘They had stripped our house and our daughter’s house of everything.

‘There was only one mattress, a few pots and pans and some cutlery.

‘And it was downright nasty. This was before we had tap water and it didn’t look like they had flushed the toilet in those two and a half years.’

The couple piled their car high and supplied the homes from Britain – which cost a further £7,000.

But in 2018, they discovered their car was gone and the house had been broken into again.

Phil said: ‘They had ripped off the security gates and smashed all the patio doors – there was glass everywhere.

‘They took everything of value that wasn’t broken. It had all been new, including TVs and microwaves.

‘Luckily the insurance paid out this time, but it gave us a very bad feeling.’

This turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The Bulman family put their dream home on the market and it eventually sold in 2021 for just £160,000.

But the story continues: Phil says they were told they hadn’t paid enough council tax and are still waiting for the bill.

Now back living in the south-east of England, Phil summed up the experience in one sentence: ‘It was a dream that turned into a nightmare.’