Housing rental has become one of the hot topics in Spanish society. The rise in prices, low supply and complaints from both tenants and owners are setting the political agenda. Among the problems are the deadlines that owners must wait to recover their rental homes. Currently, the times have lengthened from about 6 to 8 months to more than a year in many cases. But why?
Eight months after the approval of the current Housing Law (Law 12/2023, of May 24, for the right to housing), the consequences of some of the measures that protect tenants are already beginning to be noticed. In many cases, they translate into an increase in the time to recover the home.
Although tenants cannot benefit from these measures because they do not meet the aforementioned requirements, simply submitting the procedure translates into months of waiting for the property. In addition, landlords now have to provide more requirements in eviction procedures, such as proving that they are not large tenants.
Another reason why procedures are lengthening is the saturation of the courts. Many of them have not yet recovered from the effects of the paralysis caused by the pandemic and its measures to alleviate it. Furthermore, at the beginning of last year, the strike of Justice Administration Lawyers caused the suspension of more than 350,000 trials and the paralysis of more than 400,000 lawsuits.
This has caused the average to solve a problem through the Courts of First Instance, Instruction and Family in Spain to be about 8.2 months, according to data from the General Council of the Judiciary. In 2021, the courts entered more than six million cases and left three million pending rulings. In general, the same number of issues are resolved as are filed.
The courts that suffer the most are those in the big cities, such as Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona and Malaga, which are the most saturated.
The solution, in addition to arming yourself with patience, is to prioritize the extrajudicial procedure and try to achieve an amicable agreement satisfactory to the insured that resolves the conflict without the need to file a lawsuit.
If this is not possible, there are different insurance products on the market that cover the benefit for non-payment of rent, advancing to the landlord the monthly payments unpaid by the tenant for the duration of the procedure. Many of them are modular and allow you to contract more than a year in advance, such as ARAG Rental, which offers 15 and 18, adapting to the current reality and giving its policyholders the possibility of collecting the rent while they wait for it to be resolved, finally, the conflict with the tenant.
