Current legislation has enabled the development of more than 5,000 condominiums across the country, creating a stable framework for thousands of owners. If reform is considered, it must be carefully analyzed and balanced to ensure it strengthens the condominium ownership model without generating negative impacts.
We have serious concerns about Bill 24,640 as currently drafted, as it poses a risk to condominium owners, affecting their property rights and legal security. Legal security in condominiums refers to the certainty and stability of the rules governing the ownership and rights of condominium owners. A key principle is the immutability of acquired rights: the essential characteristics of a property should not be modified without the owner’s consent.
The bill would allow developers to modify existing condominiums registered in the National Registry, radically altering the property’s characteristics without the consent of all owners. This would affect the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of condominium owners acquired their property rights.
Through the new “master condominium” model, the possibility of retroactively modifying property rights would be opened. This would give some developers, who have already developed and sold these projects under certain clearly defined conditions, a new opportunity to change the registration structure, affecting the rights of current condominium owners.
The bill also allows for the introduction of registry changes that affect property rights, facilitating the forced imposition of the merger of a condominium with other condominiums, properties not under condominium ownership, or any other property, without them having to be adjacent! With a majority vote, properties can be merged, divided, or annexed, even if an individual owner objects. This means that their ownership could be modified without their consent, exposing the condominium owners, both domestic and foreign, to unfavorable situations. It even poses the risk of insolvency for the condominium owners, who could be forced to assume additional expenses arising from an arbitrary merger with another condominium.
The bill also creates uncertainty in the real estate market, particularly affecting the development and investment in condominium properties, both locally and abroad, as well as the stability of the mortgage sector and third parties, such as the financial institutions that back the loans with which many people purchase their properties.
