What is new?
Some important laws and rules have changed in Catalonia. Updated: 15.11.2011
Since the 15th of September 2010 all the real estate agents must be registered with the government of Barcelona. He will have an AICat number. No agent is allowed to operate without this inscription and number. Every "agent" working in Catalonia from a public office or from home via internet without the obligatory aicat number (Agent Inmobiliaris de Catalunya) is considered an illegal operating agent and will get fined and stopped. For more info call us or send an e-mail.
The cédula de habitabilidad is not necessary any longer to sell a rural property with a liveable house registered. We have reached more or less the same Status Quo as we had before. That came with the change of the Catalonian Government. It will change more in future, because it is impossible that town halls charge taxes for liveable spaces (IBI urbana) and then say it isn't a liveable space. This is just an illegal behaviour!
Since an agreement between our associations and the government from Barcelona every rural house, constructed before the 11th of August 1984 will get the necessary certificate from the town halls to apply for the Cédula. Tortosa just changed and gives the certificate to all owners with registered houses, so that all can have a Cédula. The rest of town halls will follow.
What houses can be registered? Well, there are 3 conditions:
The house must be finished
The time to act against the building or builder must have passed
There may not be a case opened against the building/owner
At that very moment it needs 6 years completed after finishing the house to register it without having been fined, warned or menaced to destroy the house. That may change at any moment, though it isn't likely to be done, due to new laws as mentioned before. To legalize you also need a certificate from an engineer that the house is at least 6 years old, another certificate from town hall that your house has not object to prosecution and may be registered, otherwise it will not.
The worst areas in Baix Ebre regarding legalities of houses are Roquetes and Aldover. The official architect of Roquetes will tell you, that he is helping you to legalize your illegal house and when he shows up in your property he just will take pictures and then try to fine you, but never help you. Once you are fined you will never have a legal house. For a pool and a basement for a caravan one of my clients is forced to pay a fine of 30.000 €, when he let the architect in. Before, he asked him if he wants to have it all legal.
The mayor of Aldover is haunting personally illegal houses and pushes heavily the owners to destroy their buildings. After those menaces some owners just fled from their properties, sold them very cheap, or (you wouldn't believe) extended their house even more and nothing happened! I personally witnessed those cases, otherwise I wouldn't dare to talk about them.
One of the best areas is Tortosa. In the beginning of October I called Urbanism and was told that the town hall of Tortosa now states all rural houses, which are registered as "viviendas" as such viviendas and you can go for the Cédula and will have it. Isn't that a good example?
For buyers who need a mortgage to buy a property it is absolutely necessary to have this Cédula to get all the money for the purchase. Banks are very, very selective at the moment and look for all the possible papers and if there is no Cédula de Habitabilidad it is most likely that there won't be any mortgage given. For more info call us or send an e-mail. If you encounter any problem regarding the truth of what I was writing in this page, I also would appreciate a message to occasionally correct the text. Thank you and hopefully this will help you to understand a bit what is going on in Baix Ebre, Spain.
With best regards, Gerard