According to HPL (Horizontal Property Law), the budget of a community is shared among all the owners according to the quota coefficients, which it is a percentage on the total of the building. If you add up the quota coefficients of all the properties of the community you will get 100.

          These quota coefficients are mainly established in the deeds of the buildings as a decision of the developer, and it will be later reflected in your own deeds.

          The clause number 5, says that “To determine the quota coefficients the useful surface of each house or local in connection with the total of the property will be taken into account, their interior or external location, their situation and the rational use that it will be made of the services or common elements.”   

          The problem arises when we discover that the coefficients decided by the developer are not fair. In fact it is not difficult to find a community in which two properties with the same size and characteristics have different quotas. Even worse, in some cases, one of the largest apartments pays less than the smaller ones.

          The horizontal property Law establish in clause 9.5, e) that the owner of a property in a community will be obliged to:  “e) Contribute with general expenses for the proper maintenance of the property, their services, payloads and responsibilities which are not liable to be individual, according to the participation quota determined on the Tittle Deed or to what has been specially determined.” 

 According to the HPL, to modify these quota coefficients established in the deeds, it would be necessary the unanimous consent of the community or a Sentence from the Court.

It would be useless and quite harmful to stop payment as a consequence of this unfairness because these quota coefficients will remain into effect until the judge or the unanimous consent of the meeting says something different.

In most cases, it will be impossible to get the unanimous consent, (mainly because the people who pay less will not be willing to pay more), so the only way to resolve the problem is starting a court procedure to get a judge resolution changing the way the budget is shared among the owners.

          If you are thinking of changing the quota coefficients of your community, get proper advice.