Cataluña to Start Charging Tax on Empty Properties from 1 March

It’s only just over a week to go now before the autonomous region of Cataluña implements a new initiative whereby owners of empty properties will have to start paying a tax to the regional government on a regular basis.

Nevertheless, this new law, which was passed in July last year, does not apply to everyone that owns an empty property in the region.

Only banks, large estate agencies and legal/corporate entities will have to pay this tax if they own properties that have been empty for two years or more with no justifiable reason for being so and are located in an area classified as a “zone of great demand”.

In fact, this actually only applies to around 8,300 properties in the region, and does not affect private property owners at all.

The amount to be paid in the form of this tax will depend on the number of square metres of the property. The lowest rate to pay is 10 euro per square metre, which will increase to 30 euro per square metre for the maximum rate.

So, for those properties or buildings that have a total area of up to 5,000 square metres, the owners will have to pay the lowest rate of 10 euro, which would be a maximum of 50,000 euro. The middle rate of 15 euro per square metre will be applied to properties of between 5,000 and 20,000 square metre, and the highest rate to those with an area of more than 40,000 square metres.

The Generalitat has already calculated that for each empty property, the equivalent tax to be paid will be somewhere between 800 and 2,600 euro.

However, these amounts can be reduced. If, for example, the owner of the property hands over the property so it can be used for social housing, he will receive a discount of between 10 and 100%.

Cataluña’s regional government has announced that through this scheme a total of around 8 million euro can be generated and that this money would go towards buying apartments that will in turn be used for social housing themselves.

As well as generating money to put to good use for the community, the government is aiming to have greater control over all the empty properties in the region and reduce the number of buildings and apartments that are just standing empty and are not being used.

Source: www.idealista.com