Unlawful Community Administrator?

Hi,

I bought a flat in Orihuela area, and I just found out that our comunity management holds the keys of my pigeon hole. When I asked them about, they say they will give it to me as soon as I pay the outstanding comunity charges.

To be honest, I find it quite outretgeous and extorsive, I am unable to get hold on my water bills, council tax and all sort of correspondence.

Furthermore, I am not sure how many years I have to pay as I found this in the deeds:

"No obstante, yo el Notario le hago saber que responde la parte adquiriente con el propio inmueble adquirido en esta escritura de las cantidades adeudadas a la comunidad de propietarios para el sostenimiento de los gastos generales por los anteriores titulares hasta el limite de lo que resulten imputables a la parte vencida de la anualidad en la cual tenga lugar la adquisición y al año natural inmediatamente anterior, por lo que el inmueble adquirido esta legalmente efecto al cumplimiento de esta obligación."

it is like a tonge twister... it seems that I should pay the previous year, but not more than that.

If there is a lawyer in the forum that can give me a hand with this and mainly where I stand with the keys of my 'buzón'...

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Oscar

What do your community rules say about this?  Many communities have big problems with late payers and need to use all the levers they can to encourage slow payers to cough up.  It might be a rule in the community rules.  After all the pigeon boxes are the property of the community. Your right to use it is by virtue of being a paid up member of the community.

Why don't you just pay up?

Pigeon box! Luxury.  I've had just three items of post in 2 years as my communities agent  AEA Administration just throws away my post if it's not collected within about 6 weeks. 

It coiuld be worse.  They could threaten to throw your post in the bin if you don't pay. 

My community agent throws my post in the bin but I do pay on time - by direct debit.

I am so envious.

Maybe I have legal grounds to sue my Community adminstrator A.E.A.?

Dear Oscar:

This paragraph ( I am quoting it below) is a warning of the Notary of what  provision 64 of the Local taxes Act say : the flat itself is the guarantoor of payment of owed community charges for the months passed of the acquisitionyear and the whole year  efore. That is why is so important to ask for updated payments to the Community of Owners from your seller.  The notary is  lgally obliogued to ask for that information and to warn on the content of that provision.

Best weekend,

Maria

No obstante, yo el Notario le hago saber que responde la parte adquiriente con el propio inmueble adquirido en esta escritura de las cantidades adeudadas a la comunidad de propietarios para el sostenimiento de los gastos generales por los anteriores titulares hasta el limite de lo que resulten imputables a la parte vencida de la anualidad en la cual tenga lugar la adquisición y al año natural inmediatamente anterior, por lo que el inmueble adquirido esta legalmente efecto al cumplimiento de esta obligación."

Hi Oscar and welcome to EyeonSpain. 

I and many others, I presume, are curious why you just don´t pay the Community charges?

Hi - I agree with Denise - I don't understand people who buy in Spain and then pretend that they don't understand that it costs money to maintain the pool, the gardens and the private streets in their urbanisations.  If you bought in an estate in the UK which had common ground you would of course be expected to pay towards the upkeep of that common ground - so what is the problem???????? 

We constantly have owners who say they didn't know that they had to pay to the community - we try to be sympathetic but at the end of the day, you need to pay for  the common areas where you have your property.  We have a lovely  community at Playa Golf and are anxious to get the community involved in making this a great place to live and to take holidays -  .but so many people have been sold the idea that all they have to do is pay the deposit on a property and then the money will come flooding in. 

Please - accept that if you have bought a property as an investment that you need to pay an annual fee to ensure that your investment is worth something.   You will not get holidy-makers coming to your property if you have not ensured that the communal areas are well funded and well maintained.

If you look after your investment and have an honest company to look after your property then you are best placed to weather the current problems.

Hello all, I have had to delete some posts not because of censorship but simply because there were some HTML tags that hid the rest of the content (Ozgarcia perhaps you posted straight from MS Word?). Apologies if you lost your post in the process....

Well bad news then, as my post was deleted.

Anyway I had time to reflect and write again the post. I was saying paying was not the issue. I want to pay what is in the law, but knowing some administrations in spain, I will double and triple check until I am happy.

I am sorry to read Mr. Millsom and find out how his mail is treated. I have to say AEA only deserves the boot. In US inerterfeering with the delivery of mail is a criminal federal ofense, and I hope the spanish law agrees with me. Mail is a right, is not access to the gym, the swiming pool, the gardens, etc. The pigeonholes just happen to be in the entrance of the state, without any maintenance and piling up dirt & old mail. I feel  that the extortionist behaviour of the administratration is outrageous. I would like the read Maria's legal opinion about that, if she has some time to spare with us.

There are a lot of foreign people mislead to believe that buying abroad as an investment was just like investing in shares. I remember the state agent telling us that there were not community charges in the development, and many of us bought off plan to find out, that the property is full of problems rather than joy. I feel lucky that at least my property is not in an illegal plot of land, and I feel that buying in Spain is not different from buying in Morocco or Panama, where you are on your own.

Costas, I had trouble with this thread & alerted you to it in my thread Problem with a thread, EOS.
 

As I then saw this thread had been sorted out I tried to post a 'thanks, it's sorted now' in the thread I started. I clicked the post reply but my post disappeared ! The reply post was still showing though without my text !

Hi Oscar - forgive me if I am wrong but I think you may be from my community and I talked to you and your partner when you last visited.  If so, I didn't recognise the post at first because you have misunderstood the situation.

We do not withhold keys to the post boxes for non-payment of community fees.  The reason you were not given your keys that day was that we did not know who had them and, as Correos had refused to deliver mail to our community, it wasn't really that high on our agenda to obtain them.  However, the day that Correos agreed to deliver our mail, I went to the builders and found that they still had the post box keys.  We have put in our March committee minutes - which have been emailed to everyone - that we now have the keys and that owners can come and collect them from the President. 

We took the decision not to give out pool keys to debtors as our community has spent a lot of money on the pool and we don't see why those who have refused to pay their share of the work should benefit from it.  We are owed a huge amount of money by members of the community which is simply not fair on those who do pay. 

I was also confused about your reference to the Administrators.  Their role here is simply to take in the fees from community members and advise the committee about any late payers.  The committee then instructs them when to take legal action and this was voted on at the last AGM of owners.  Whilst there have been some difficulties with the Administrators about ensuring that payments are properly recorded, they have never had anything to do with keys.

Again, please accept my apologies if I have mistaken who you are - unfortunately I was unable to send you a Private Message because you haven't done the minimum 10 posts yet.

Dpto. Contabilidad"

Hi Oscar - you won't be able to send or receive PMs until you have posted 10 times. 

I don't want to put personal phone numbers on a public site, but if you follow my link below to my Remax website then you will find my contact details there.  Talk to you soon. 

I've been following this thread but keeping quiet because I was struggling to understand the situation. But it appears to me that you bought direct from the promotor, who hadn't made any contribution to the community since it was formed, despite legally being the owner and therefore liable for community fees. This is not an uncommon scenario. However, your lawyer (if you used one, and if he was independent of the promotor) should have checked the status before you signed for the property and advised you of the outstanding debt. If he didn't, he was negligent, and you should question him about this. If you didn't have legal representation (or if you used a lawyer recommended to you by the promotor) it appears very much like you knowingly bought the property with this debt on it (even if you didn't actually know), and unfortunately there's nothing much you can do about it other than pay up. I don't really fancy your chances of persuading the promotor that they should pay it. I hope it's not too much.