RIPPED OFF

Time for a rant by a con­fused and an­noyed guiri who has lived here for al­most 30 years and still runs into prob­lems with the way things are done. Even though, in the­ory, I speak and un­der­stand Cata­lan very well.

The five years on my flat rental con­tract are up. I’m not going any­where, and the land­lord can have no com­plaints about my ten­ancy, as far as I’m aware. So time for the two par­ties to renew the con­tract, right? With a slight ad­just­ment in rental price to ac­count for in­fla­tion, even though any­one rent­ing a flat these days is feel­ing the fi­nan­cial heat at least as much as any land­lord when it comes to the un­bear­able rise in the price of liv­ing, right? Wrong and wrong again. And the new hous­ing rental law passed in May 2023 will pro­tect me as the ten­ant against any furtive at­tempts to over­charge me by the al­ways hon­est and scrupu­lous es­tate agent, right? Wrong a third time.

I re­ceived a “buro­fax” – a reg­is­tered fax used in this part of the world to mean its re­ceipt is doc­u­mented – from my charm­ing es­tate agent two months be­fore the ex­piry of my old con­tract ex­plain­ing that I would have to re­nounce that one and sign a new one prior to said ex­piry (I’m start­ing to use slightly more for­mal Eng­lish here to get you in the mood for what’s com­ing…), and that this would in­volve me pay­ing the es­tate agent a con­tract sign­ing fee made ex­pressly il­le­gal by the afore­men­tioned new law (I’ve added that last part... they didn’t seem to know it was il­le­gal when they sent it to me, poor things must be over­run with work to have missed all these new laws for­bid­ding them from rip­ping off ten­ants). And also that my de­posit would be re­turned to me as I was sign­ing a new con­tract, and the new de­posit charged ac­cord­ing to the new rental price, which had risen by pre­cisely 4.13%.

When I pointed out, quot­ing the new law ver­ba­tim, that a) the cost of the new con­tract now legally fell upon the land­lord, not the ten­ant, so would they be so kind as to please re­move that from the bill? and b) to my un­der­stand­ing, there was a limit of 3% rise in rental prices in 2024, I was in­formed in no un­cer­tain terms (noth­ing po­lite about the reply, and no sign of an apol­ogy for try­ing to rip me off to the tune of 600-odd euros), that the item had (re­luc­tantly, I as­sume) now been re­moved from the bill, but that be­cause it was a new con­tract the price rise was legal. Hav­ing con­sulted var­i­ous con­tacts in the real es­tate busi­ness and my own “gestor”, I was told that the re­quire­ment to sign a new con­tract seemed shady at best, and pos­si­bly il­le­gal, but that also I was risk­ing being left on the street come the end of my con­tract given the cur­rent de­mand for flats in Barcelona. So I went ahead and agreed to the price hike and thanked them whole­heart­edly for not charg­ing me the il­le­gal amount they had orig­i­nally added to my bill.

On we go. After re­ceiv­ing the draft con­tract and read­ing a very con­fus­ing, to me at least, clause of how much I had to pay my land­lord if I left my flat within a year of sign­ing, I asked the agent ex­actly how much this com­pen­sa­tion would amount to, pro­vid­ing an ex­am­ple. I re­ceived a curt emailed re­sponse im­ply­ing that I was ask­ing a lot of ques­tions about this con­tract and why didn’t I just sign it? In ad­di­tion, there was this: “the owner wants to make sure that the ten­ant stays at least one year and does not va­cate the flat ear­lier”. Well, my heart goes out to land­lords in these hard times.

Imag­ine if for some rea­son through no fault of my own I am forced to leave the flat, or I ac­tu­ally have the au­dac­ity to leave of my own vo­li­tion, be­fore a year is up. Then I have to pay com­pen­sa­tion to the mon­ey­bags land­lord who is rak­ing it in month after month. Hav­ing checked the le­gal­ity of the clause and being told it was now “stan­dard pro­ce­dure”, I duly signed. As Lou Reed sang on the track Dirty Blvd from his 1989 New York album , “Some­where a land­lord’s laugh­ing till he wets his pants”.

opin­ion