Out of exhaustion, helplessness, not wanting to lose more money… “I had never considered selling… until now; my mother wanted us to preserve the family heritage, but it’s getting more and more complicated”, laments the owner of a farm in the Eixample. There must be few like him left in Barcelona, ??but his case exemplifies the difficulties involved in renting a home in the city. If Joan was the name of this owner, Joan stopped collecting the rent – ??an unheard of 570 euros for a flat in the Eixample of around 80 square meters – in April 2022 and, despite the declaration of non-vulnerability from the tenant, he couldn’t get the keys back until November. The judicial maze has given no other option. Now he has the keys, but he still hasn’t got the rents back.
His goal was not and is not to speculate with this house, nor to get rich with the estate that his grandfather bought, and where his mother was born and he and his brothers were raised, on Calle Floridablanca. Their goal is to maintain the building with the rents and they have not been achieving this balance in recent years. Taxes, repairs, insurance and farm expenses eat it all up.
The tenant of the apartment in question stopped paying rent in April 2022. He also didn’t pay it in May, or June, or July… After the summer, the landlord decided to file the lawsuit . At the time, Joan didn’t know that the tenant and his sister (who also lived there) owned a flat in Carrer Balmes and three other properties in Barcelona, ??as well as a house in Perafita. The two brothers had subrogated to the old rent contract that their mother had signed in the late 1940s.
At the end of September 2022, the judge accepted Joan’s lawsuit (after a six-month default) and set the hearing for January of last year and the launch for March. “We thought we were lucky and that the owner would be able to recover the keys to the flat in a reasonable amount of time,” says Eva Cordobés, his lawyer and director of the Legal Advice Department of the Barcelona Urban Property Chamber. The tenant received the notification. However, as the trial date approached, the court reported that it could not find the proof of receipt, so the counter was reset to zero.
The judge set new dates and the hearing for March 21. But then the tenant’s lawyer appeared and requested the suspension due to illness. The social services, when they verified the man’s properties, declared that he was not vulnerable, but on the day of the launch, March 21, and given the real situation of illness, the owner let the brothers stay- there are two more months. “I was sorry… they were neighbors all their lives,” he says. However, the tenant’s lawyer tried a last ploy by agreeing to hand over the keys in exchange for the forgiveness of the debt (8,600 euros of unpaid months) when the tenant had already died. And despite the fact that they were not vulnerable and despite the properties they had, the lawyer then alleged that the sister lived in the flat, which forced the owner to certify that the house was empty – the sister lived in a residence – since the death of the tenant. With this, the delivery of keys was delayed again and instead of April, he could not get them back until November 13.
“Every month we receive a dozen cases of this type, from owners who have tenants who do not pay or who have exhausted the contract and continue to pay and do not leave”, explains the lawyer. In the case of Joan, he has filed a lawsuit to recover the almost 8,600 euros he stopped collecting, with which he will not be able to pay, even remotely, the works to rehabilitate the apartment, which the brothers left in a deplorable state , “to rent in these conditions… why?”, he asks.