Community Fees

 sorry if iam using this forum for the reason it was intended, (instead of arguing with people) but can anyone help with the following questions?

how does the community fee work,is it a blanket fee for the whole resort,or do we pay for our own individual area( we are on the south island ).

what does the fee pay for and who manages this fund. 

Ash,found the thread,thanks again to RussW for the info,will follow up your leads. 

This is a really complex topic to understand and everything starts from the creation of the Communidad, the community of owners which is required under Spanish Law to run and control the management and control of the properties typically on individual phases of a development and a good place to start with information is

http://www.spainexpat.com/spain/information/spanish_property_communidad/

A community is lokked after by a commitee and an independant qualified administrator controling the funds and payments to the various suppliers of services like pool maintenance, gardens, lifts, block cleaning etc. Thd commitee is made up from property owners

What happens is normally the community will be for each phase, blocks around the pool or then total phase so if  you have a Menta and I expect,  because they have one pool, that all of the Mentas will be one Communidad, but we have been asking and Calidona have not yet confirmed this. Then an overall MAN community is formed to look after things common between all phases like security and site cleaning

Normally each property will have a percentage allocated to the costs, a parcela, based on the meterage of the property, and obviously the bigger the property the more you pay towards the overall costs

The developer will normally arrange the first AGM, suggest the administrator and that is when they will confirm the annual fees for the phase based on the overall costs

This meeting is normally only called when a certain percentage of the properties are handed over and Ithe developer has to pay the monthly fee for all empty properties so don´t worry if you thought that if only 2 people are in the block that you will end up paying the total bill between you

You should also be checking when the community fees start on this site but at the moment nobody knows the rates

Again sorry for the size of the post but this is a very complex subject and on my own development often fraught with politics and we have had 3 different administrators in 5 years

Thanks to Russ for a vote of confidence.

Just to prove I do read what happens on ther forums I thought I would copy this post sent previously by PM to a similar question on community fees.............................................................................................................................

The Community of different Phases is formed as soon as possible after all completions on the Phase have been finished. In our case at Roda Phase 2 it was 2 or 3 months after we completed. This is because the developer wants to hand over responsibility for costs etc asap.

Basically it is up to the owners to form the Community and elect a President and Vice Presidents but in fact this is difficult as no one knows who anyone else is.

Again at Roda the developer put forward an Administrator, Housing Comunidades in San Javier who called the first meeting to set up the Community, with I have to say very little notice to be able to organise attending.

The meeting was attended only by a few owners with a few more proxies and Housing were accepted as the administrator and whoever volunteered was elected as Pres and VPs.

The Community has a set of byelaws, make sure you get a copy and this sets the model for how it should be done.

A budget is calculated which determines the maintenance fees depending on the square metreage of each property and includes security, garden and pool maintenance, public area cleaning, lift maintenance etc etc.

Invoices are then sent to all owners who will be expected to contribute as soon as they are received.

Two things to note are

At Roda, many of us felt the Community was handed over without enough attention to the way Roda had done all the communal work and should have been snagged if that is the correct phase for community grounds etc.

This meant that once faults are found it comes out of the community budget rather than the developer, not very satisfactory. We are still fighting Roda over replacement of trees that have died since planting for instance.

The other thing is that you are all rather in the hands of the Administrator when determining which contractors to use for which job.

At Roda a number of these have since been changed once the Pres and VPs and others get involved with the work, if there are owners with any particular areas of expertise they are very useful in advising on contracts.

Contrary to some thoughts, maintenance contracts are not cheap in Spain as wages are reasonable and the companies will attempt to squezze as much as they can out of so called rich Brits.

Hope this helps

When you guys say "percentage of fees payable are dependant on size of property" does this mean size of build or total size. eg. my property 'will' be 78.1 sq m build but then have an additional 94+ sq m of terracing, where-as another may be 98sq m build with only 20 sq m of terrace. Which size(s) are taken into account when slicing the cake ?

Yes the bigger the overall plot the more you pay but you are only taking small amounts in difference

On our own urbanisation, made up of townhouses and apartments we agreed when we formed the community that, regardless of size of property everybody would pay the same amount, which in my case with an apartment worked out to €11 a year more but it was fairer as we all use the pool and have 3 bedrooms

The villas on Corvera will have their own community and the apartmets will have their own

Steve

Not sure I can answer that one, re size of build and total size.

Your ratio may have been included in the completion documents from the Notary but think you would need to ask either Corvera or your solicitor for confirmation.

Out of interest, at Roda, communities vary from approx half a dozen townhouses up to 300 apartments and I think it is dependent on what and how building licences were applied for.

I believe there is no community on Roda for any of the villas as they have their own pool and gardens but am not sure how they will contribute to security and other genaral costs which are currently been covered by the developer as the Entidad, or whole community has still not been formed.

Ash

We are friends now