Many owners go to the administration office asking for an EGM because they consider there is an important issue to be discussed. In many cases, these owners have problems with the president and they just want to get rid of him, so the president is not interested in calling for the meeting as they are proposing.

          The administrator will always give these owners the same answer: “The administrator is not authorized to call for an EGM”. Only the president or a group of people who owns more than a fourth of the whole community would be able to call the meeting.

          The Horizontal Property Law, in the clause 16.1, is quite clear:

“ 1. The General Owners  Meeting will be held at least once a year to approve the budgets and accounts, and other times if the President considers it convenient or if the fourth part of the owners require it, or a number of them who represent at least a 25 % from the participation quotas. “

          You may know that every property in the community has a percentage and when you sum up all the percentages you get 100%.

To be allowed to call for a meeting the number of owners should be of over 25% of the total.

This means that the administrator needs to sum up the coefficients of the owners who ask for the meeting, and he will only call for the EGM when the total coefficient is over 25%.

For instance, in a community with 20 owners, in which all of them have the same coefficient in their title deeds (5%), it will be necessary to have 5 owners requesting the meeting. Otherwise, these owners will have no right to call for the EGM, so they will need to get more owners supporting their motion to be entitled to call for this General Meeting.

Something different would be the right of the owners to ask the president to include in the agenda of the meeting other issues that they consider convenient. According to the Article 16.2: “Any owners will be able to ask the Proprietors Board to study and give their opinion about any subject of interest for the community. He/she should send a writing to the President for this purpose, where the required subjects to be dealt with are clearly specified and the President will include them on the agenda of the next Meeting.” 

Should the president or a group of people who owns more than a fourth of the whole community do not call for the meeting, there is nothing the administration can do and the administrator would not be responsible for the lack of meetings in the whole year.