17 March, 2015

By VIVA Team

While the sorry sight of demolished homes will continue, at least homeowners will now be properly compensated.

Thousands of homeowners who bought a property in Spain that has since been declared illegal breathed a huge sigh of relief this week as the laws relating to compensation were amended in their favour.

A change to Spain’s penal code was passed by the ruling Mariano Rajoy-led government that dictates judges must ensure that property owners who purchased an illegally built house in good faith are compensated before any demolition order is passed.

This long overdue legal change could positively impact thousands of homeowners – which includes many Brits – who had previously faced the prospect of losing their home and their investment under the old law…

But the Spanish senate has finally seen sense in the face of sustained pressure from the opposition Socialist Party and the AUAN association, which was set up to represent the owners of more than 12,000 illegal properties in Andalucia’s Almanzora Valley.

AUAN’s campaigning has cascaded across the country, and could now see more than 300,000 homeowners in southern Spain properly compensated for their loss before their property is demolished.

Gerardo Vazquez, a lawyer for AUAN, told local press that the amendment by the Spanish senate “protects the good-faith buyers, but does not go as far as we would have wished”.

The issue of illegally built properties has haunted thousands of Britons who purchased property around the turn of the millennium, many of which were built without the proper licenses by unscrupulous developers. The majority of Britons who then purchased these homes did so not knowing that they were, in fact, illegal.

For AUAN, the compensation rule change is an undoubted victory, but the pressure group has said that it will keep on campaigning until all properties currently deemed illegal are finally recognised by the law and provided with proper water and electricity connections – something that has often been denied homeowners who bought such properties.

For now, however, this concession by the Spanish government to side with the thousands of homeowners who simply wanted to purchase a dream property in Spain is a massive – and much welcome – step in the right direction.