Unpaid community fees

 I am the president of a small community of 20 houses.  I allowed one unemployed family to pay by 12 instalments of 25€.  They have made only 1 payment, what action can the Community take to recover the the balance of fees due (275€).

Any information would be a help.

Unfortunately you cannot take any direct action such as curtailing any community services.

You can 'name and shame' debtors, providing this is done within the community and cannot be viewed by any member of the public from outside the community.

The only other action you can take is to go to the 'Small Claims Court; which will be quicker than the normal courts, as you can get them into a court date within 3 - 4 months. But unless you can get the Judge to include the court costs into the Judgement against them, which seeing as they are unemployed I can't see a Judge doing so, then you got to ask yourself: "Is it worth it!"

Wow! 6000€ per year seems very, very low for community fees! I would have thought you would pay more than that for community water, electricity and admin fees for 20 houses. We pay 103€ per month for one of my properties, which is in a small urb. of 33 houses. On that Urb. our community bills and sink fund come to 40,788€ per year.

It is certainly a very small amount right now, but you can certainly start by claiming out of court ( through yours or the Community´s lawyer letter) and if not succesful include the topic in the next community meeting. A Judicial trial for this amount is certainly not an option due to associated costs.

6000 per annumfor 20 houses is not that low if there is no lighting, pool area or gardens to maintain & remember 5% goes into the reserve fund

Are your family resident in Spain if so you have to persue via the Spanish court system if they have a property in another European coutry you can ask http://www.communityfees.com to look inot recovering the debt.

But as you are a small urb why not knock on the debtors door and ask if they intend to pay if they answer no tell em you will persue the money via the courts

technoape your fees seems very high for a small community do you all have individual pools/lifts cos tis is what takes the cash ? or is your administrator taking you for a ride in fees I live on a community of 36 we pay according to plot size , street lighting, pool & garden maintenence and 5% into the pot  still only commutes to 12500 pa and we have a good reserve to fall back on, you must have a big pot of money with40,00+

Believe it or not, it's the normal amount for this area!

We have:

Administrators, Gardeners, Maintenance, Pool Maintenance/Cleaning, Cleaners, Communal Electricity (Lighting and Pool) and Communal Water (Gardens and Pool), Macro Community Fees (Street Lights, Garbage Collection, etc) and Sink Fund.

And yet we still have non-payers, all though thanks to the efforts of our President last year (me!), the non-payers debt to the community were drastically reduced via negotiation. The only debts we have now are people we have no contact details for (as they have moved), so we are trying to track them down in the UK and Ireland as we speak.

You need to move further north then

 Thanks for all the info.  The property is now up for sale, but if they don't pay it will make it harder to sell.

It is a lot cheaper on the Costa Blanca than Costa Del Sol.  Our 3 biggest items are pool cleaning 2000, insurance 1600, electric & water 1000.