What if a property has a previous debt of IBI the owner was not aware of?

I am writing about this issue because I had a recent case in one of my latest closings that I thought it was worth to comment.

The first question would be: who is liable for that IBI debt?

• The owner at the time when the receipts were due is the liable subject. However, the actual owner has subsidiary liability on that debt. That means that if the Administration (in the case of the IBI and the province of Málaga is the Patronato de Recaudacion Provincial) is unable to recover that debt after using all legal means to achieve it, the actual owner will be-come liable. The Administration will have to declare its impossibility to recover that debt (declaración de fallido) and then initiate a new proceeding against the actual owner.

If the actual owner has not been notified of that debt until the declaration of impossibility by the Administration, can the debt be considered prescribed?

• The prescription period for that IBI debt is four years counted from the last notification by the Administration or the issu-ing of the original IBI receipt. However, if the Administration has been notifying the original debtor, not the actual owner, on timely manner that prescription is not applicable. Therefore, the answer is NO, if the Administration has been notifying the original debtor in a timely manner, the debt is not prescribed even for the actual owner.

Does the new owner have to pay the penalties and/or default interest that were being applicable to the IBI receipt payable by the original debtor?

• The answer is NO. When the Administration declares the impossibility to recover the debt from the original debtor and starts a new proceeding against the actual owner of the property, it has to write off the penalties and default interest ap-plied to the original debt.

Since each particular case is different, it is fully recommended that you check your own details with your lawyer or tax advisor.

The Eralia Housing Market Report for the Costa del Sol / Informe de Eralia sobre el Mercado Inmobiliario de la Costa del Sol

Please take a look to the 3rd quarter Eralia Housing report for the Costa del Sol. There are lots of interesting pieces of information to understand how the real estate market of the Costa del Sol is behaving.

El informe del tercer trimestre sobre el Mercado Inmobiliario de la Costa del Sol ya esta disponible. Hay mucha información muy interesante para poder entender que esta pasando en el mercado inmobiliario.

The change is here! The prices in Marbella are finally going up.

Finally, and after the crash of real estate market in Marbella at the beginning of 2008, the prices are starting to show a different tendency. Although they have been flat for about three years, it is now when they are starting to show an increase. That is what we can see on the data released last week by the Ministry of Housing. It is not a high increase but at least it seems that we have reached the inflexion point. 

I have been talking in my later newsletters about a sense of a better market. An increasing number of transactions was the first signal of the recovery and 2013 already showed that tendency that has been confirmed in 2014. However, during this year the prices remained flat up to now. An increasing number of properties in the market and a still weak general economy were probably restraining the raise in the price index. In fact, as can be seen in the attached chart for the province of Malaga, the foreigners are the ones leading the recovery with an also increasing percentage of transactions.

The situation in Estepona is completely different. In a way the news are also “good”. In this case, the prices are still going down but with a lower pace. In 2014 the index in Estepona kept the downward tendency but the one showed was not as bad as the one in the precedent years (2008—2013) when it accumulated most of the 48 % drop from the 2007 prices.