Community fees and derramas explained — a guide for foreign owners in Fuerteventura

If you bought an apartment in Fuerteventura and the first thing you received was a Spanish-language notice about cuotas, coeficientes and a derrama, you are in good company. These are the three words that decide how much your property costs you every year, and they are almost never explained to a buyer at the point of sale.

Here is the whole of it, in plain English.

Your cuota: what it is and why yours differs from your neighbour's

Article 9.1.e of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal states the obligation simply: every owner must "contribuir, con arreglo a su cuota de participación fijada en el título" — contribute according to the participation quota fixed in the constitutive title of the building.

That quota — your coeficiente de participación — is a percentage attached to your unit, not to you. It was set when the building was divided into units, taking as its base the useful floor area of each unit relative to the whole, along with its position in the building and the use it can reasonably be expected to make of common services and elements. Every ordinary expense of the community is divided by those percentages.

Three things follow, and each surprises somebody every year:

• The bigger unit pays more. Not because it uses more, but because it holds a larger share of the building.
• The penthouse owner who never uses the pool still pays for the pool. Common expenses are shared by coefficient, not by usage. Unless your statutes exempt a specific unit from a specific expense — some do, for ground-floor commercial units and lifts — the pool is everybody's.
• Changing a coefficient is very hard. It lives in the constitutive title, so altering it requires unanimity of all owners representing all quotas (art. 17.6). In a community of sixty owners across four countries, "unanimity" is a polite word for "no".

If you have never seen your own coefficient in writing, ask. It should be on your deed and it should appear on every statement you receive.

What the ordinary fee actually funds

An ordinary annual budget in a Fuerteventura community typically carries:

• Maintenance and repairs of common areas — the parts of the building nobody owns individually and everybody depends on.
• Contracted services: lift maintenance and its mandatory inspections, cleaning, gardening, pool treatment and its health-authority obligations, pest control.
• Supplies: water and electricity for common areas, and in many island communities the largest single line — irrigation and pool water.
• Insurance for the building and civil liability.
• Staff, where the community employs concierges, cleaners or gardeners directly, with the Social Security and payroll obligations that come with them.
• Administration and banking.
• The reserve fund.

That last one is a legal obligation, not an option. Article 9.1.f requires a reserve fund of no less than 10% of the community's last ordinary budget, available for conservation and repair work on the building and, since the more recent reforms, for accessibility and energy-efficiency improvements.

A community running with an empty or notional reserve fund is a community that will meet its next roof with a derrama instead of a plan. Which brings us to the word owners actually fear.

Derramas: the special levy

A derrama is an extraordinary contribution, voted by the owners' meeting, to fund something the ordinary budget does not cover: a façade, a lift replacement, a structural repair, a pool refurbishment, a legal proceeding.

There is no mystery to it and no discretion in it. A derrama is legitimate when — and only when — three things are true:

1. The junta approved it, with the majority the law requires for that class of decision, at a meeting properly convened with the item on the agenda.
2. It is apportioned by coefficient, exactly like the ordinary fee, unless the statutes or the agreement itself lawfully provide otherwise.
3. It corresponds to a real, quoted cost. In a well-run community that means three comparable written quotes on the table before the vote, not after it.

Your administrator does not decide a derrama. If a budget runs short, the answer is an extraordinary contribution voted by the owners — never a figure the administrator sets alone. We say that plainly to every community we take on.

Who pays a derrama if the flat is sold?

The general principle: the obligation is born with the agreement. A derrama voted before you bought is, as between seller and buyer, the seller's; one voted after you bought is yours. But that is the internal allocation, and it is not what the community is bound by — see the next section, which is the part that costs foreign buyers real money.

What happens when an owner does not pay

Spanish law treats community arrears seriously, and the consequences escalate.

You lose your vote. Article 15.2 is explicit: an owner not up to date with all overdue community debts at the moment the meeting begins may take part in the deliberations "si bien no tendrán derecho de voto" — but has no right to vote. The convocation itself must carry the list of owners in arrears (art. 16.2), so it is not a private matter.

You cannot challenge the agreements either. To contest a community agreement in court under article 18 you must first be up to date, or judicially deposit the amount owed. Withholding your fee because you disagree with a decision removes your ability to argue about the decision.

The community can claim through a fast-track procedure. Article 21 provides a proceso monitorio route, and where the claim succeeds the debtor bears the lawyer's and procurador's costs within the limits the procedural law sets.

And the debt follows the property. This is the one that matters when a flat changes hands. Article 9.1.e states that the acquirer of a dwelling "responde con el propio inmueble adquirido" — answers with the property itself — for amounts owed by previous owners, up to the part of the current annuity and the three preceding calendar years. The unit is legally charged with that obligation. You can buy a debt you had nothing to do with.

The protection buyers are talked out of

Because of that, article 9.1.e also gives buyers a shield. On any deed transferring a unit, the seller must declare that they are up to date with community expenses, or state what they owe — and must produce a certificate of the state of debts issued by the secretary-administrator with the president's approval, within a maximum of seven calendar days of being asked. Without it, the notary cannot authorise the deed unless the buyer expressly waives the requirement.

That waiver is a single line in a deed, offered helpfully at a busy signing, and it is how people acquire other people's arrears. Do not waive it. And read what the certificate does not say: it certifies debts, not derramas already approved and not yet billed. Ask separately for the minutes of the last two years and the list of agreed but unbilled works.

What you should be able to see, as an owner

None of the above is difficult once the numbers are visible. Our position is that an owner should not have to ask for their own community's finances:

• statements published online, monthly rather than once a year at the meeting;
• a quarterly report — fees paid, incidents resolved, votes coming up;
• the documents that back the figures, in one place;
• all of it behind one login, in English, Spanish or German.

An error found in March is a correction. The same error found at the December meeting is an argument.

If your community's accounts are hard to read, that is a fixable problem — it is what our accounts, budgets and fees service does, and if arrears are the real issue, arrears recovery is the specific answer. If you own from abroad, our page for non-resident owners covers the rest.