THE NUMBER OF GERMANS WHO NOW OWN PROPERTY IN SPAIN IS OVER 500,000. THEY LONG FOR THE SUN AND THE BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN. HOWEVER, THIS SOMETIMES GIVES RISE TO VARIOUS PROBLEMS THAT NEED TO BE SOLVED.

Question: We recently bought an apartment in Málaga. The building is practically empty, as only two of the eight apartments – including ours – have been sold. Now the property management company is asking us to share all the operating costs with the other neighbour. When we complained, we were told that the developer was not required to contribute to the unsold flats. He is exempt from this by the community rules. Is this legal?

Answer: Anyone who has purchased a property in Spain in recent years may have been delighted by the wide range of properties on offer and the fall in prices. In almost all small and medium-sized towns, but especially on the coast, the market has developed in favour of buyers. To this day, supply exceeds demand. There is a surplus of properties that is only slowly being absorbed. This is why there are high vacancy rates, especially in the urbanisations completed in recent years, but also in smaller, newly built housing communities. Those who bought here at a low price but were not interested in the ongoing costs, such as contributions to the owners’ association, apart from the costs directly associated with the purchase, are often in for a bitter surprise: many property developers have reduced or even waived their own contributions to the community expenses in the declaration of division or the articles of association. In concrete terms, this means that the property developer, knowing that the sale of individual properties may take years, has ensured that it is exempt from community costs until the transfer of the separately owned elements. In return, the costs are naturally distributed among the remaining owners, who ultimately finance the property developer’s savings.

A clause exempting the property developer from its contribution obligations was declared null and void there.

Particularly when there are more expensive communal facilities such as swimming pools, gardens or lifts, and, for example, two or three buyers of individual flats are solely responsible for the running costs of a 20-unit property, these costs can throw the entire financial planning off balance. In any case, this common practice is a nuisance. Judgment 25/2015 of the Audiencia Provincial Málaga, dated 27 January 2015, now vigorously counters this phenomenon and has thus strengthened the rights of buyers. A clause exempting the developer from his contribution obligations at the expense of the other owners was declared null and void.

Interestingly, the court states that this circumstance already follows from the fact that such a procedure must be considered a violation of consumer protection rights. As a result, this would also mean that the otherwise applicable short periods for contesting the contract would not apply, and that legal action could still be taken even after these periods had expired. This ruling is a huge boost for the owners affected and opens the door a little wider to putting an end to such abuses.

Since summer 2015, we have been covering topics related to Spanish law in the bilingual magazine ‘La Guía’. Both the published articles and the answers to readers’ questions are reproduced in full in German and Spanish.