Community agreements are compulsory for the owners but the horizontal property law says that some agreements should be registered in the Registry Office to be obligatory to the new owners that were trusting in the information provided by the registry office and could not know that the community had approved something different.
All the agreements to approve or modify some clauses of the statutes or the quota coefficient of the properties or other aspect of the constitutive title of the community “ shall not bind third parties unless it has been registered in the Land Registry” according to the clause nº 5 Horizontal Property Law.
This means that, for instance, when the community approves that the debtor cannot use the pools or other facilities of the community when they are in arrears or when the community approves that the flats or houses in the community cannot be used as touristic apartments, these agreements could not be obligatory for someone who buy the property afterwards and the community had not registered these agreements in the land Registry before the property was sold.
In the same way, in many communities the quota coefficients of the properties are clearly unfair. This quota coefficients are stablished by the developer and register it in the Land Registry so that it will be reflected in their own deeds and they are not aware that in some cases they are nonsense in comparison with the rest of the properties of the community.
When the owners know the coefficients of the rest of the properties and realize that the distribution of the fees is completely unfair, they try to get the agreement of the community to rectify this mess and, when this is not possible ( it would be necesary to get the unanimous consent of the community and the one getting advantage of the mistake will not agree to rectify it), the only solution is to go to court and the judge will sentence the change of the quota coefficients appropriately.
In all the cases mentioned before, the new owners who buy the property and neither the new statute rules nor the new quota coefficients have been registered, could say that they know nothing about it so they will try to avoid the application of these changes, so they could consider that they are entitle to rent out their properties as touristic apartments or to pay only according to the quota coefficient is in the Registry Office no matter how wrong this one could be.
Courts are usually considering that new owners could be affected, even without the registration in the Registry Office, when they knew about, or were able to know, these agreements when they bought their properties. The problem is that without the registration of this agreements the community cannot be sure the new owners will have to accept the agreements, so the full guarantee would be to register them but most people are not aware about the high cost that this registration could mean for the community.
A rectification of the coefficient will mean the modification of all the registered properties and the registry cost would be as if every particular property were sold, so in case the community has many properties the cost could be huge.
Even the registration of the agreements for the new statutes clauses could be very high, so the community´s neighbour should be aware about this cost when they complain to the administrator or the president about the lack of registration of these kind of agreements.
As always, everything will depend on the particular case, but be aware of this cost before going further. It would be silly to start a court procedure to rectify the coefficients thinking that you will register the changes to discover afterwards that the cost of the registration will be higher that all the savings in community fees for the next 10 years.