Once the deposit and reserva are all done, the sale is agreed and in place the agent will normally start to make arrangements to get a date for the actual sale/transfer of title. I am not sure how this works if you are getting a mortgage, we were paying cash, but I am sure the process is the same. They will of course try to get it done as soon as possible as they want their commission on the sale. In Portugal it is the same as in the UK the seller pays the agents fees, so there is no worry there, but don’t let them bully you, remember at least one of you will have to be there for the day of transfer, but you need to consider the cost.
For us it was getting very near to Christmas, and as you know the airlines tend to inflate the price of the flights at that time of year, we looked at the options and decided that we didn’t want to complete until the early part of January, flights then were much more reasonable. We are talking up to a 5th cheaper than before Christmas.
It did give us a slight problem in that Teresa running her own business, a Montessori Nursery School, she really have to be there, especially at the start of term, so we took the decision that just I would go. This had the additional benefit of halving the cost.
The final part in preparation was to get the balance paid into the, in our case lawyers bank account, but it could be the agent ready for the transfer day. We follow exactly the same process as previously with the deposit to get the money across, this time it was there in just under 24 Hours.