Ownership quotas and community fees

In our community, each house has a % quota assigned which weighs the votes at the AGM (bigger house, bigger vote). But every house in the community is paying the same community fee, regardless of ownership quota. If we all pay the same fee, surely everyone's vote should count the same? Any advise is appreciated!

According to the Horizontal Property Law, the resolutions of the Meeting of Owners are passed by a double majority, that of owners and that of quotas.  For the first majority, the number of owners in favour or against the resolution are counted and you need more than one half in favour for the resolution to pass.  For the second majority, the amount of quotas in favour or against the resolution are counted and you need more than one half in favour for the resolution to pass.

For the first majority, if a property is owned by more than one person, these owners will have to decide which of them casts the vote as that property will only give one vote.  Likewise, if an owner owns more than one property in the community, this owner will only have one vote for the first majority.

For the second majority, the quotas of those owners voting in favour or against are added up.  If an owner owns more than one property, his total quotas of all properties will be taken into consideration.

That is the Law and cannot be modified by the Statutes or internal resolutions.

A different thing is how the owners' contribution to expenses is calculated.  According to the Law, the contribution will be based on the quotas each owner has although the Statutes can stipulate that the contribution will be the same for each property, regardless of the quota.  This resolution to alter the way expenses are distributed requires unanimous consent and to modify it in the future, a unanimous vote is also required.

Since the way it is being done in your community required an express change from the quota based system to an equal contribution by all properties, I would try to make sure this was correctly voted in when it was first introduced.   If it was,  you can ask that the next Meeting of Owners (whether AGM or EGM) discusses changing the way expenses are distributed to a quota based system.  As mentioned, to pass, the resolution requires a unanimous vote.  This is quite difficult to obtain because generally those owners that will have to contribute more in a quota based system will object.

To summarise, you can change the way community expenses are distributed among the owners but you cannot modify the way votes are computed in Owners Meetings.

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply, it is most helpful!

Very unusual for fees NOT to be based on the sqm of your property as listed in the Catastral Register.

I have been in contact with the administrator who said the decision to charge all houses equally was made before the community of owners existed and is in our titles.

Having checked the statutes and certification logged with Registro de Propiedad it does mention the equal part fees in the notes. But there is a standalone sentence in the main document stating "no se certifica del estado de cargas por habrese solicitado asi expresamente", there is not much context so could refer to other types of charges perhaps? 

When we moved in. all properties paid the same community fees. Once the community was finished we had an AGM and told the law said we should do it by quota depending on property size.

This was brought in straight away and, at the next meeting, we were asked to vote on changing it back to paying the same. This would need a unanimous vote and just one vote would keep it on quotas. Of course, just one person who was now paying quite a bit less voted against and it remains on the quota.

When we were all paying the same, every house had one vote. When we changed to a quota then the houses paying more had more votes depending on the amount of fees being paid. One big property gets 3 votes at each AGM and we get 1.5 votes. The apartments are limited to one vote.

As said, prior to that we all got one vote only so I imagine the quota was based on the amount of fees you were paying rather than the size.

Perhaps communities have to abide by democracy whether all members like it or not. New members should make themselves aware of the rules before becoming part of the community.