Out of exhaustion, out of helplessness, out of not wanting to lose more money... “I had never considered selling... until now; “My mother wanted us to preserve the family heritage but it is becoming more and more complicated,” laments the owner of a property in Eixample. There must be few left like him in Barcelona, but his case exemplifies the difficulties of renting a home in the city. If Juan were the name of this owner, Juan stopped collecting rent – an unheard of 570 euros for an apartment in l'Eixample of about 80 square meters – in April 2022 and, despite the tenant's declaration of non-vulnerability, he would not He was not able to recover the keys until last November. The judicial labyrinth has given no other option. He now has the keys, but he still hasn't recovered the rents.
His objective was not and is not to speculate with this home, nor to become rich with the farm that his grandfather bought, and where his mother was born and he and his brothers grew up on Floridablanca Street. His objective is to maintain the building with the rents and they have not been able to achieve this balance in recent years. Taxes, repairs, insurance and farm expenses eat up everything.
The tenant of the apartment in question stopped paying the rent in April 2022. He also did not pay in May, nor in June, nor in July... After the summer, the owner decided to file the lawsuit. At that time, Juan did not know that the tenant and his sister (who also lived there) owned an apartment on Balmes Street and three other properties in Barcelona, as well as a house in Perafita. The two brothers had taken over the old rental contract that their mother had signed at the end of the 1940s.
At the end of September 2022, the judge admitted Juan's claim to processing (after a six-month non-payment) and set the hearing for January of last year and the launch for March. “We thought that we had been lucky and that the owner would be able to recover the keys to his apartment in a reasonable time,” says Eva Cordobés, his lawyer and director of the Department of Legal Advice of the Chamber of Urban Property of Barcelona. The tenant received the notice. However, as the trial date approached, the court reported that it could not find the acknowledgment of receipt, so the counter was reset to zero.
The judge set new dates and the uprising for March 21. But then the tenant's lawyer showed up and requested a suspension due to illness. Serveis Socials, upon verifying 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 allowed the brothers to stay two more months. “I felt bad... they were lifelong neighbors,” he says. Even so, the tenant's lawyer tried one last trick by trying to agree to hand over the keys in exchange for debt forgiveness (8,600 euros of unpaid rent) when the tenant had already died. And despite not being vulnerable and despite the properties they had, the lawyer then alleged that the sister lived in the apartment, which forced the owner to prove 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 in April, he was not able to recover them 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 paying and do not leave,” explains the lawyer. In the case of Juan, he has filed a lawsuit to recover the almost 8,600 euros that 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, "rent "Under these conditions... for what?" he asks.
