Elderly people fall prey to real estate companies 11/04/2008 00:00

Throughout Spain, property developers are intimidating the old into moving out of their houses.

From the outside, the large, old building known as la corrala, or the courtyard, on Ventorillo Street in central Madrid, looks like any other urban rehabilitation project, complete with a dilapidated façade, broken pipes and piles of rubble in the entrance.

Venture inside, however, and the more than 100-year-old building reveals itself as one of the most prominent battlegrounds in a series of escalating disputes between tenants and landlords in cities across Spain.

For the past 11 months, la corrala's 10 female inhabitants, aged between 62 and 85, along with the bed-ridden husband of one of them, have been aging Davids in a fight against a corporate Goliath, the real estate developer Sistema 23.

Faced with threatening letters demanding they vacate their apartments, the "grandmothers of Ventorillo," as they have come to be known, fought back, taking Sistema 23 to court and accusing the company of trying to coerce them out of their homes.

But while their stand made headlines, they are not a unique case in Spain in falling prey to the bullying and intimidation of a real estate developer.

And, as Spain's housing market slows after a 10-year boom, many more people, especially the poor and the elderly, could find themselves victims of similar abuse as developers seek to capitalise on high-value and high-demand city centre properties in their portfolios.

The affair has even drawn the attention of the United Nations. In a new report on the state of Spain's real estate market, Miloon Kothari, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, warns that "developer intimidation in Spain is particularly severe".

He describes the current state of affairs as "shameful" and argues that such "serious cases are not found in other regions of the developed world."

Part of the problem, real estate experts say, is that legislation and regulations have failed to keep pace with the fast-moving market of the last decade.

Many of the people who fall prey to pushy developers are still paying so-called "old rents," created under the Francisco Franco regime and which today amount to often just a few dozen euros a month.

They are also reluctant to trust developers' promises that they will be allowed to return to their old homes once the renovation project is completed or be given new ones. However, frequently no such promises exist, with developers instead simply trying to force people to leave by whatever means possible.

"We've reached this situation because market laws have ended up regulating citizens' rights to housing, but fighting intimidation is possible and it is punishable," explains Marina Parés, the president of Sedisem, an association that fights intimidation in business and society.

The most important precedent for courts intervening against developers was set in 2003. Owners of the top- and bottom-floor apartments of a three-storey building in Getxo in the Basque Country, took their middle-floor neighbour to court after he tried to make their lives unbearable in order to coerce them into selling him their homes so he could have the whole building.

Among other tactics, he gave the keys to his apartment to a 30-member Gypsy family. After the original residents filed more than 50 complaints on receiving threats, being robbed and, in the case of the ground-floor owner, having his apartment flooded, a court ruled that the family must be evicted.

Some developers have become so skilled in the art of scaring people into vacating their rental homes or selling at below-market prices that they have come to be known as "granny startlers".

In Barcelona, for example, a 75-year-old widow was forced out of the home her family had rented since 1936 without any compensation because of false claims and constant coercion by a developer.

In Murcia, meanwhile, an elderly couple sold their house for half its market value after being burgled regularly for months. But such cases, the ones that make it to court, may be only the tip of the iceberg.

[El Pais / Francesco Manetto / Expatica / Jasmine Ow]