Tenants relieved after rent regulation in Catalonia: “The landlord has called me every week pressing to raise the price”

The regulation of rental prices in 140 Catalan municipalities comes into force this Saturday. Good news for tenants, who will see rents go down or at least slow down, at a time of housing crisis, with the market at historic highs and a gap between salary increases and rents that continues to widen. . The application of price regulation in Catalonia comes after two years of a deregulated market, since the Constitutional Court struck down Catalan legislation that also sought to freeze prices.

The high court responded with the annulment of appeals from the PP and the Government of Pedro Sánchez and argued jurisdictional issues. The new Housing Law, which contemplates the containment of rents, came into force last May, on the eve of the municipal elections, but ten months have passed until the Ministry of Housing has published the official index and given its approval. to the tense market areas proposed by the Generalitat and its plan of measures to reverse the situation.

The wait has been long for tenants, and distressing for those who had contracts that ended on February 1: the Ministry designated last month as the month when the regulation came into force. What follows are three testimonies of this situation in Barcelona, in which they have lived for weeks under pressure from their landlords to raise the price.

An unaffordable raise and six weeks without a contract. Marc Martí (false name) told his case to this newspaper at the beginning of February. His contract ran out on day 1. His landlord is a natural person with the status of a large holder and asked for an increase when renewing the contract from 1,200 euros to 1,350, which he later reduced to 1,300. But with only one salary, accepting the raise strained his finances to an unaffordable limit. “Paying 1,200 euros represents just over 33% of my income” has been his argument from the first minute, with the added anguish that his son lives with him. The pressures of the property, through an intermediary, have been tremendous, he says: “What if I was becoming a squatter, what if they were putting it in the hands of the legal office” until at the end of February when a lawyer contacted him informing him that The judicial process began for being out of contract. Martí did not move. With three arguments: that there was no change in the floor that justified the increase, that his income did not allow him to pay more, and that the regulation was a matter of days. Finally, this week he received a new message offering him a contract for three more years, an extension that would prevent them from lowering the price. He has not responded. He hopes to sign a five-plus-three-year contract next week, as corresponds to large holders, and at the price set by law, which in this case would be a reduction: from 1,200 to 1,142.3 euros set by the index.

Seven years of “goings-on” in a large rental property. Some of the tenants of the 50 apartments of a building in Raval owned by the Vivenio company had also explained their cases on another occasion to this newspaper. It was when the Constitutional Court overturned the Catalan law on rent containment and they discovered that their contracts contained the so-called “Berlin clauses”: conditions that the property would activate if the price containment rule was annulled. For example, the text reported that “common expenses, the Real Estate Tax and, where applicable, the Waste Management Fee” could be affected from the third year of the contract, which has not yet arrived. The name of the clause became popular because the German Constitutional Court also struck down rent regulation in the city of Berlin. One of the neighbors is Diana Virgós, an activist for the right to housing. She has been on the farm for six and a half years and her contract ended on March 2, but since the end of January she began receiving communications. “They asked me to sign a 35% increase (about 560 euros, for a 39 square meter apartment), plus non-payment insurance that I paid and benefited them and more expenses (IBI, community and taxes) that could be activate if the law falls.” Reviewing communications from the company through the mobile application, it turned out that the contract expired on March 30. But they haven’t charged her for the month, so she paid it by money order. “Since January they have called me every week, pressuring me to raise the rent and to sign the increase,” she says, in addition to messages warning her that she was “in a precarious situation and it will be an illegal occupation.” “According to them, I am precarious and they have begun the procedures to kick me out. They asked me for documentation in case they had to offer a social rental,” she explains. Now with the law in force, she hopes to redirect the situation by renewing the contract while maintaining the price and trying to reach an agreement with other tenants in the block who are in the same situation.

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Buy time until law enforcement. Pere Maluenda lives in a large estate of rental apartments in the Sant Antoni neighborhood owned by the real estate investment company Testa. He is 59 years old and has been on the farm for nine years. He pays 950 euros for a rent that when he entered cost 775. He had a contract until June of last year and they asked him for an “unacceptable” increase of 400 euros. He went to the Tenants’ Union, which he had joined years ago but had never used. With the slogan “we stay” and price regulation in sight, he did not accept. In the summer they did not give him the bill, because he was without a contract, and in September, “in a change of script”, they extended it until January. At the end of the month, he says, he received a burofax about the termination of the contract and non-renewal. Since then he has periodically called the “special cases” department while he “buys time until law enforcement.” The expired contract included expenses that cannot be collected under the new law. With the price index in hand they should reduce the price by 40 euros. He hopes to sign a new contract immediately, while he regrets “the rampant price crisis that no one has put a stop to and has expelled so many neighbors, when the rent limit seemed to be the sky.” “The regulation is late,” he says.