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Holiday Home Rental Dilemma
18-Apr-2007
Property owners in Portugal are confused by new
legislation affecting holiday home rentals.
The Algarve Resident’s recent report on the complex
licensing legislation affecting holiday rental properties
shows that, to date, these laws show no signs of being
altered or clarified.
Now one Algarve villa rental agency, Caspo Business,
based in Praia do Carvoeiro, has launched a service
to prepare and obtain licence applications for its clients.
The service is not free, costing on average between
€1,000 and €1,200 per property. About 15 (mainly German)
clients have taken up the offer and although the first
applications were submitted to the câmaras two months
ago, no licences have been issued to date.
Properties are supposed to be inspected by the Autoridade
de Segurança Alimentar e Económica (ASAE), the government
inspectorate that enforces this legislation, but Hélder
Martins, President of the Algarve Tourism Board, commented
in January that, in the 13 months since the legislation
began being enforced by ASAE, only around 10 villa owners
in the whole Algarve region had managed to obtain the
necessary licence from their local câmara.
It also emerged last month that a villa owner from
Quinta do Lago completed all the required paperwork,
but had his licence request refused on the grounds that
the resort’s alvara do loteamento (the master planning
document submitted when the resort was first developed)
only allows properties there to be used for habitation
and not for tourism. This means that, in many of the
older resorts, in theory a licence cannot be obtained
unless the resort has its master planning document altered,
a move that is extremely unlikely.
Even a spokesman from ASAE seemed to be unclear on
the issue.
“The law states that no-one can rent a property without
holding the licence,” he said, while also admitting
that the current law is not adequate and that it must
be changed.
“It is impossible for the câmaras to process all the
paperwork to licence the large amount of holiday villas
in the Algarve.”
Read the article:
http://www.homesworldwide.co.uk
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