No disbursement of funding - Tax office is slow

So a little reassurance: my husband spoke with the construction company again: it is 8% annual interest, phew! Despite everything: is there a way to expedite the [Grunderwerbsteuerbescheid]?

Only the tax office will be able to answer that for you, after all, they are the ones who issue the document.

when the land register entry has been made or when the notary confirmation is available.

You are already writing the solution: notary confirmation. With this, the notary confirms that there was a notarization appointment for the property purchase and that he has forwarded the documents to the land registry office, which then registers the purchase in the land register. This confirmation is needed to buffer long processing times.

The notary confirmation should now really be sufficient for the bank to at least pay out the first installment. This first installment is usually below the value of the property, which the bank could repossess from you if necessary. The bank's risk is therefore limited.

Exactly. The sum of the answers is the solution.

8% annual interest sounds better, but will still be wrong.

The construction company will usually only be able to assert the statutory default interest. And this is 5% above the base rate. And this is, simply put, at 0, so only 5% default interest p.a. in case of emergency.

So: thanks for the many replies. The thing with the 5% seems interesting, I will look into it more closely. Unfortunately, the notary confirmation is only available once we have the property transfer tax assessment, and for that the tax office would have to come out of the "knick". But that would then be sufficient and we wouldn't have to wait for the land register entry. But exactly this tax office... An application for early processing was rejected. How can they only catch up 1 month in 2 months? I don't need much math to figure out what that will look like there in 2 years. Is that normal?!

Ultimately, it depends on the bank whether they approve the loan. The idea that is "floating around" here is that the notary confirms to the bank that the process has been submitted to the [FA]. Possibly, the [FA] can confirm receipt or that would also need to be provided to the bank. This would then show that you have provided everything necessary but are just stuck in the waiting loop of the [FA].

If that is enough to (partially) release the loan, you are rid of the problem – only the bank and notary can tell you if that works, but in my opinion, it’s definitely worth a try.

Best regards
Dirk Grafe