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New Legislation Stipulates that Residential Rental Contracts will Last for 5 or 7 Years

15 December 2018 – Expansión

On Friday, the Council of Ministers gave the green light to a royal decree of urgent measures relating to housing and the rental sector. The Minister for Development, José Luis Ábalos, highlighted that the majority of evictions occur due to a failure to pay the rent, whilst the number of mortgage foreclosures has decreased.

The main measures with respect to rental are: extending the term for the extension of leases, from three to five years – or up to seven years if the lessor is a legal entity – and increasing the term for tacit renewals from one to three years. Also, limiting the deposit to two months as a guarantee, facilitating agreements between tenants and owners to improve housing, management expenses shall be borne by the lessor when that is a legal entity, improving the remission of tourist rental contracts and horizontal ownership so that three fifths of the residents can limit tourist apartments, amongst other measures.

Nevertheless, the minister highlighted that this decree does not include measures aimed at intervening in rental prices, as had been agreed with Unidos Podemos in the budget agreement. However, he did not rule out that they may be included within the framework of the budget negotiations for next year.

For the time being, and precisely due to the absence of these measures in terms of prices, Pablo Iglesias has warned that the vote of his party to approve this decree-law will be “unfavourable”.

“We had agreed something else with them in the budgets, that the housing measures had to include controls over rental prices to decrease rental prices”, he said when the measures in the decree were made public.

“We hope that they are rectified so that we can go ahead with this decree, provided that it has the same content that we agreed”, added Iglesias, who also declared in a tweet that “the Government’s decree does not contain the most important measure from the agreement: that of prohibiting abusive increases in rental prices”.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake