1999-04-00-Debtor's Law--How To Collect Payments

Question:
Is it true that Spain's new Community Law makes it easier to collect back fees?
We have heard that the new Law of Horizontal Property makes it easier for Communities to collect these unpaid dues. Can you confirm this?

Answer:
YES, WE CAN. Spain's revised Law of Horizontal Property. which regulates communities of property owners, went into effect in April. 1999, which makes it quite new by legal standards. The new law greatly eases and speeds up the process of compelling defaulters to pay their annual "cuotas". In fact, something like 70 percent of all back fees in Spain have been paid since the law went into effect.
The system works like this: At the AGM you vote to authorize the President to collect back fees. He informs the debtors, either by a certified letter to their property in Spain, or, if this is not possible, simply by posting the notice to pay on the Community Bulletin Board, for only three days. This is a great improvement over the old system, which often required that the debtor be notified in his home country. If the defaulter does not pay within a reasonable period, the President can take the unpaid demands to a Spanish Court. The Court will swiftly order the debtor to pay or show reason why he should not pay, within 20 days. If the debtor does not pay and does not appear to show cause in 20 days, the Court will order his assets in Spain seized up to the amount of the debt. These assets include the debtor's local bank account.. Formerly, the only recourse was to order the debtor's flat seized and sold at auction for the debt. This drastic method took a long time. Now, the Court can simply order the money, plus costs, taken out of the debtor's local bank account. And, yes, fear of having to pay costs has caused many of Spain's community defaulters to pay up promptly.
The new law also makes it much easier for urbanizations of detached villas to form a Community of Property Owners under the full protection of the Horizontal Law. The law itself is really designed for apartment buildings and clusters of townhouses. Detached villa estates formerly had to constitute the cumbersome "collaborating urbanistic entity of management and conservation”, a legal body which involved the Town Hall, in order to really compel payment of debts.
Now, such urbanizations can make themselves into a normal Community with only the usual formalities. They can then take advantage of the rapid justice system for collecting back payments as well as all the other elements of the Horizontal Law.