What a property administrator actually does
Administering a homeowners association rests on four jobs that happen at the same time and are rarely visible from outside: keeping the accounts, calling and documenting the general meetings, complying with what the Spanish Horizontal Property Act requires, and dealing with problems in the building before they turn into bigger ones.
In practice that means preparing the annual budget and defending it at the meeting, issuing the payment notices and tracking who has paid, calling the ordinary meeting and any extraordinary ones needed, drafting the minutes and keeping them safe, maintaining the official books, issuing the certificates of outstanding balance that the notary asks for when someone sells, hiring and supervising contractors, filing insurance claims, and answering the phone when a pipe bursts on a Saturday night.
It is a regulated role. The administrator answers to the owners’ meeting for their management, and that responsibility has concrete consequences: we set it out in detail in the legal obligations of a property administrator, because it is the question we are asked most.
An association can run without a professional administrator and appoint one of the owners to the role. It is legal, and we explain it here. What usually happens is that the neighbour who takes it on discovers six months later that the role eats whole afternoons and sets them against the people they live with, and that a mistake in the accounts or in a meeting notice is paid for by the whole community.
Changing property administrator
This is what most associations call us about, and it almost always comes with the same question behind it: whether it can be done without conflict and without the community being left halfway.
The change is a resolution passed by the owners’ meeting and it has to be recorded in the minutes. From there, what determines whether the transition goes well is not the resolution, it is the handover: the accounting records for the current year, the books, the contracts in force with suppliers, the true state of unpaid charges, the open incidents and the community’s bank details. When that handover is done badly, the community spends months rebuilding information it already had.
The way we work is to start with an assessment before the meeting votes: we review the state of the accounts, what contracts are signed and what is owed, and with that the community decides knowing where it stands. We then call the meeting for the change, receive the documentation, notify suppliers and banks, and take over. If you want the procedure step by step, we have written it up in our guide to changing property administrator.
Unpaid charges: what happens with owners who do not pay
Unpaid service charges are the problem that damages a community fastest, because the money one owner does not put in ends up being put in by the others, and because it poisons the meetings.
The usual route starts with a written demand and notification to the owner of the outstanding balance. If that goes unanswered, the meeting can resolve to pursue the debt through the courts, and that is where having the accounts in order and the minutes properly drafted stops being an administrative matter: it is what the claim rests on.
That is why we do not treat arrears control as a collections task, but as part of ordinary bookkeeping: up-to-date balances, correct certificates and a history that can be defended. We go into it in how to deal with unpaid service charges in homeowners associations.
Meetings, minutes and the president’s role
A meeting that is called incorrectly can bring down the resolutions passed at it. The notice, the deadlines, the agenda and the way decisions are recorded are not formalities: they are what makes a special levy or a change of contractor enforceable afterwards.
We support the president both in what the law assigns to them and in what in practice overwhelms them. It is a role that many owners take on without knowing what it involves, and two of our most repeated questions come from there: what the president does when there is an administrator and whether you can refuse to be president. Also how to call a meeting properly, which is where a good share of the problems start.
What the fee covers and how it is quoted
Our fees are set per community, based on the number of owners, the common elements to be maintained (pool, gardens, lifts, garage, sports areas) and whether the community needs to be looked after in more than one language. We do not work from a single rate, because a twelve-home block with no common areas and a development of four hundred homes with its own staff are not administered the same way.
What is fixed is what is included: ordinary administrative, accounting and legal management, the year’s meetings, handling of incidents and access to the owners’ portal. Before a community votes for us, we set out in writing what the fee covers and what is billed separately, so that the meeting can compare it with what they have.
On the part of the spending that does depend on management, we have written how to reduce communal costs without sacrificing quality and how to optimise them. Reviewing maintenance and utility contracts usually yields more room than communities expect.
Communities with owners who do not live in Spain
On the Costa del Sol and in Sotogrande this is the normal situation, not the exception: communities where a significant share of the owners live abroad and cannot attend the meetings.
That changes how you administer. Communications have to go out in Spanish and in English, meeting papers have to arrive far enough in advance for someone living abroad to delegate their vote sensibly, and payment notices and certificates have to be available without depending on somebody dropping by the office. We work in Spanish and English and deal with owners resident abroad as a matter of routine.
The other side of it is tax: a non-resident owner has obligations of their own in Spain simply for owning a home here. Because the firm also covers the tax side, that part is resolved with the same point of contact instead of sending the owner off to find a separate adviser.
Accounts, incidents and minutes, available when the owner needs them
Every community we administer has an owners’ portal where they can look up the accounts, the state of their payments, the minutes and the progress of open incidents, without having to call the office or wait for the annual meeting.
It is not an extra: it is what lets an owner living in London or Madrid follow the life of their community the same way as someone living in the building, and what avoids a good share of the “whatever happened with that?” calls. On why this has stopped being optional, we wrote about digitalisation in property administration.
Building works, regulations and the matters that arrive unannounced
Communities on the coast accumulate a very particular kind of matter: refurbishment and works on common elements, installing electric vehicle charging points in the garage, disputes between neighbours, use of the common areas and of the caretaker’s flat, and short-term holiday lets within the building.
Each of those has a technical side and a legal side, and the administrator sits in the middle. We have written up the ones that come up most: charging points in communal car parks, the rules on building works, noise disputes, the rules on dogs and the rules of a homeowners association.
When a matter gets complicated, there is no need to look for a lawyer elsewhere: the legal and tax teams are part of the same firm, and whoever runs the community has the person handling the litigation or the tax question sitting next to them.
Where we administer communities
We administer homeowners associations, residential developments and mixed-use buildings across the western Costa del Sol and in Sevilla, from our five offices. Each area has its own page with the detail of the service:
- Property administration in Marbella: residential communities and developments within the municipality, with service in Spanish and English.
- Estepona: urban communities and new-build developments.
- Sabinillas and Manilva: coastal and residential communities. This is our head office.
- Sotogrande: gated developments, resorts and communities with international owners.
- Sevilla: urban communities in the city and the metropolitan area.
We also look after communities in Casares and in the other municipalities around our offices.
Where to start
If your community is considering a change, what helps is not a blind fee proposal: it is knowing the state of the accounts, the contracts and the unpaid charges before taking anything to the meeting. We carry out that assessment with no obligation and hand it over in writing, with a detailed fee proposal, so that the meeting decides with the numbers in front of them.
