How to Evict a Tenant who is not Paying the Rent

[Colin]

Hi, Can you help us? Due to the credit crunch we have been unable to pay our rent. My landlord will not consider an amicable agreement and came by the house today to say we had very little time to pay what we owe him. We have received no court papers or any sort of formal demand to pay, indeed I have no idea of the exact amount the landlord believes we owe him. I know what we believe we owe him but there appears to be a discrepancy in this figure. The house is in the Catalonia countryside and we do not have a postal service to the house, I have an Appartado de Correos that the landlord is aware of, no papers have been received there. If he has taken eviction proceedings that we did not know about can these be overturned and if not what can we do? I believe we should be able to pay the full amount we believe we owe to the landlord within the next 3 weeks. Your advise would be invaluable to us now.

[Lawbird Lawyer]

Dear Colin,

To have you evicted from the property this can only be done through a formal legal procedure which implies you receiving a registered letter from a law court informing you of the impending court case being held against you.

Whether you receive this letter or not will not stall this procedure. This letter is received at the property being rented.

To stall the eviction procedure, if it really has been filed, you can lodge the back rental at the law court where the court case is being dealt with.

If there is no case against you you can lodge it in the bank account of a Notary as proof of payment.

In both cases if you bring up to date the owed rental they cannot evict you.

In Spain late payment is enough cause to have you evicted. You will not be able to follow the above strategy a second time if it happens and you will be evicted regardless. More on this:


Paying the Rent Late Twice will be Cause of Eviction – 4th June 2009

Yours sincerely,
Raymundo LarraÃ*n Nesbitt

[Unregistered]

Hi,

We have rented our property in Mallorca for 18 months now. For 12 weeks we had no running water (on and off) we were without water for almost 10 hours a day (the water is community not mains supplied, to which our Landlord pays for the community charge). Due to this we have not paid rent for 2 months as for these two months we could not shower, flush the toilet, wash clothes etc. We now have running water again so we have started to pay the rent again. We offered to pay 50% of the rent for the two months but the Agent would not accept this only offering a 20% reduction. We are unable to agree a figure so the Agent has said they will cancel the contract and Evict us via the courts. Are they able to do this?

Many thanks all