Buying an apartment in Spain not only means anchoring yourself to a mortgage for a long period of time, but also to the payments and contributions of the community of neighbors. Neighborhood fees are a legal obligation for all owners who are part of a community, according to the Horizontal Property Law; however, many They have managed to avoid them by letting time pass.
Community meetings are usually one of the main reasons for discussion between neighbors, especially when one of them decides not to pay the fees. A problem that usuallyand be postponed, with the intention of claiming it at some point. However, this attitude can lead to serious consequences, as established a ruling from the Supreme Court.
As he warned Raúl Gómez, lawyerand the Onda Cero program ‘It’s not hours’, the neighborhood communities have a limited period of time to be able to claim to delinquent neighbors with pending payments. This period is five years from the date on which they stopped paying the fees and, if not fulfill it formallyyou will lose your right to claim.
The community must claim the debt within a period of five years to prevent it from expiring.
This period is part of the reforms introduced by Law 42/2015 and “ensures that delinquent neighbors do not have to pay certain outstanding community fees.” when 5 years have passed without the latter having formally claimed it“explains the lawyer. Precisely, in this last specification lies the key to this issue, since a debt claim letter.
This letter must include the personal details of the president or administrator of the community, including address and location. Next, the information related to the debtor owner must be indicated. the pending feespecifying the amount, the origin, the deadline to pay the payment and the bank details where to make it. Finally, they mustwarn the legal consequences of not settling the debt.
Otherwise, as the lawyer warns, “a community may find itself demanding 6,000 or 7,000 euros and end up earning just 1,500because the rest has been taken by the clock.” An example that does not come out of nowhere, but rather arises precisely from the case that motivated the Supreme Court ruling. In it, the residents of a Madrid building demanded payment of a debt of 6,497 euros accumulated between 2007 and 2014.
“The problem arose when the matter reached the competent chamber of the Supreme Court because the court reviewed the case and concluded that the oldest installments could no longer be claimed because they had expired“explained Raúl Gómez. A sentence that is based on the article 1966 of the Spanish Civil Codein which it is established that “payments that must be made for years or in a shorter period” expire after five years if they have been claimed.
Each installment will have a specific prescription period
Therefore, of the 6,497 euros that they initially demanded, they could only charge 1,698 euros“corresponding to the most recent years and the rest was legally out of play,” the lawyer summarized the radio program. With this ruling, the Supreme Court declares that Each installment has a specific prescription periodwhich begins from the moment the debtor stops paying it.
“That is to say, does not prescribe all the debt together“explains the lawyer, which will mean a greater complication for the community administrators, who will have to calculate the period in which they can request the collection of the debt. This, as Raúl Gómez explains, will mean the end of some of the most common phrases in this type of problems, such as: “We will claim when we can”, “it will catch up” or “We will try to resolve it amicably.“.
However, remember that it will not be necessary to file a lawsuit to interrupt the statute of limitations. It will serve to present “a formal and reliable claimthat is, something that allows proving that the community claimed the debt within the deadline.” Thanks to this, the process will continue and The delinquent neighbor must face the payment of his outstanding installments.