Am not sure if this is a right place to ask about it, tried to browse the articles and previous topics, and couldn’t find something related
I and my wife applied Golden Visa through property investment in mid-Year 2019 and same as most of cases, after a long-waited time, we obtained our first 2-years resident cards in Jan 2021 successfully.
The problem actually comes from the property we purchased, which is a commercial property - a shop with official Lease Agreement signed during property purchased. The tenant just paid rent for first few months, then stopped paying rent during pandemic period without any alignment, and even resume paying after lock-down, but it’s in wrong amount given there should be rent increase from 2nd year onwards, the rent debt is accumulating month-by-month now.
Our lawyer has sent out legal letter and even judicial notification through the court, but still being ignored by the tenant. Then, we went for Special Eviction, but being rejected with an unreasonable reason - No Stamp Duty Paid, even we provided all valid documents together with Stamp Duty Paid record from AT.
Not sure if anyone have similar experiences and please share if you have any suggestions. Thanks in advance.
I dont have any suggestion for you, but I feel bad. I have heard of this exact situation happening.
Do you know if the court is asking for stamp duty on the purchase of the property, or the registration of the lease. I think the latter is more likely situation here. If the lease is not registered with Financas and the taxes being paid, they will not enforce leases.
Regardless, I have been reluctant to buy and rent property for this exact reason but I assumed it was a more theoretical risk… until I read about your situation. Good luck with this because its a bad situation. I would expect more of this to be the norm in the future as tenants become increasingly unable to pay rent due to inflation, recession, etc.
We provided all valid documents to the Court for both purchase and leasing, including all the stamp duty fee paid to AT. Both my lawyer and tax representative confirmed me that nothing is missed indeed.
The court is really making me so frustrated, and I started losing confidence in PT’s law. As a taxpayer, I’m not protected by the government and am being dragged continuously without a concrete answer
All these messy arrangement/policy enable the people like my tenant to violate the laws by leveraging on these loophole. Yes, you are right, this bad situation will not be a rare case, I believe quite a lot of landlords are suffering. So hope we can connect, share our experiences, help each others and hopefully able to find a better way. Thanks
I’ve heard from my lawyer that the brit that won the case against SEF has yet to get any sort of movement on his application despite the victory
So I’m in the same boat, PT law seems sketchy, at best.
I’m not surprised about the treatment of landlords though, lots of europe seems to go far too far on renter protections (and then wonders why people don’t want to invest in housing, if they’re even allowed by planning/zoning!)
Thank you very much for sharing your experience !
My deepest empathy to you.
Your experience is a reminder so that I should not do this type of investment in PT.
I’ve been really reluctant to buy any properties in PT because the law/government do not play fair game with the investors. So, thanks for posting your story. I’ll keep observing and not making any investment… Wish you best of luck in solving this matter.
Wish you best of luck in solving this matter.