Getting Your Comunidad to Approve a Renovation
Inside your own walls you are mostly free. The moment work touches the structure, the facade or a shared service, your neighbours acquire a vote, and the law sets the majority.
Almost every flat in Valencia sits inside a comunidad de propietarios, and the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal decides where your freedom ends.
The starting position is generous. The law lets each owner modify the architectural elements, installations and services of their own property, provided the work does not undermine or alter the safety of the building, its general structure, its configuration or exterior appearance, and does not prejudice the rights of another owner.
There is a condition attached even to that freedom: the owner must give prior notice of the works to whoever represents the community. Notifying the president before you start is not a courtesy, it is written into the same provision that grants you the right.
Everything outside those private elements is different territory. Common elements are not yours to alter unilaterally, and the question stops being whether you may and becomes what majority you need.
Does your reform need the neighbours?
Read this as a spectrum from purely private to unmistakably communal. Most disputes happen in the middle, where an owner assumed something was private and it was not.
Interior finishes and layout
Painting, flooring, kitchens, bathrooms and non-structural partitions inside your own flat are private elements. Notify the president in advance and proceed.
Structure, even from the inside
A load-bearing wall inside your flat is part of the building's general structure, not part of your private element. Touching it engages the community as well as the town hall.
Anything visible from outside
Windows, balcony enclosures, air conditioning units on the facade, awnings and anything that alters the exterior appearance are community matters even though they attach to your flat.
Shared services and risers
Vertical service runs, the general drainage, the roof and the building's installations are common elements. Connecting to them, moving them or increasing the load on them needs consent.
Splitting or merging properties
Dividing one flat into two or joining two into one changes the building's participation quotas, which is a matter for the community and for the title deed, not just for you.
Accessibility works
Works to remove architectural barriers and lift installations are treated more permissively by the law precisely because it wants them to happen, and they carry a lighter majority than a general alteration.
The majorities the law actually sets
Article 17 of the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal sets different thresholds for different kinds of decision, and the whole art of getting a reform approved is identifying which threshold your item falls under before the meeting.
Unanimity is reserved for the heaviest category: approving or modifying the constitutive title of the building or its statutes. If your project changes what the deed says the property is, this is the bar, and it is high because a single objection defeats it.
A three-fifths majority of owners who also represent three-fifths of the participation quotas governs a group of decisions including establishing or removing common services of general interest and the use of common elements. Note the double test: heads and quotas, not one or the other.
Accessibility works and lift installations sit lower, on a simple majority of owners representing a majority of quotas, because the legislature deliberately made them easier to pass. Ordinary maintenance and repairs that the building needs to stay in a fit state are not a vote at all: they are an obligation.
How approval works in practice
Approval happens at a junta de propietarios, and juntas run on a calendar. Communities are required to hold at least one ordinary meeting a year, and if yours has just held it, the practical options are waiting or calling an extraordinary one.
An extraordinary junta can be convened, but it takes the president or a qualifying group of owners to call it, and it has to be notified properly with the item on the agenda. An item that is not on the agenda cannot be validly voted on, which is a mistake that quietly invalidates decisions.
Realistically, budget somewhere between one and three months from first raising it to holding a valid vote, and longer if you have to wait for the annual meeting. If the decision is contested, add the period during which an owner can challenge the agreement in court.
Run this in parallel with your permit filing rather than in sequence. Both take time, neither depends on the other being finished, and doing them one after the other is how a spring reform becomes an autumn one.
The practical shortcut
Talk to the administrador de fincas before you talk to the junta. They know the building's history, they draft the agenda, and they can tell you in one conversation whether your item needs three-fifths, a simple majority or nothing at all.
Where it goes wrong
The most common friction point is not hostility, it is discovering mid-project that something you assumed was private is not. Air conditioning condensers on a facade and balcony enclosures generate more community disputes in Spanish blocks than almost anything else.
The second is disruption. Lifts blocked for deliveries, scaffolding on a shared facade, dust in the stairwell and noise outside permitted hours are all things neighbours experience directly, and a community that feels ignored becomes an obstacle at exactly the moment you need it not to be.
The third is money. If your work damages a common element or another flat, you pay for it, and this is precisely why your contractor's liability insurance is not optional. A leak into the flat below is the classic case.
The fourth is the one nobody plans for: works undertaken without consent can be ordered undone. The community can act against an owner who has altered common elements without authorisation, and the remedy sought is usually restoration at the owner's expense.
Four assumptions that cost money
Assuming the president can just say yes
The president represents the community, they do not replace it. On anything needing a vote, an informal blessing from the president is not an authorisation and will not survive a challenge.
Assuming the facade belongs to your flat
The exterior wall your window sits in is a common element. Changing the opening, enclosing the balcony or fixing hardware to it are community matters regardless of who uses the space behind.
Voting on an item not on the agenda
A decision taken at a junta on a point that was not properly notified in the convocatoria is vulnerable. Get the item written into the agenda before the meeting, in the terms you actually want approved.
Skipping the prior notification
Even purely interior works carry a duty to notify the community representative beforehand. It costs one email and it removes the argument that you concealed the work.
The sequence that works
- 1
Read the estatutos first
Communities can have their own statutes on top of the general law, restricting or permitting things the default rules do not. Ask the administrador for the current text before you plan anything.
- 2
Classify your works honestly
Separate the project into what is genuinely private and what touches structure, facade or shared services. Only the second list needs a vote, and knowing which is which sets your threshold.
- 3
Get the item onto an agenda
Send the administrador a written description of exactly what you want approved, with drawings if there are any, in time for it to appear in the convocatoria.
- 4
Get the approval in writing
Ask for the certified extract of the acta recording the agreement. That document is what you show the town hall, your insurer, and a future buyer's lawyer.
Where the rules come from
The framework is the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal, the Spanish statute governing buildings divided into separately owned units. Article 7 sets out what an owner may do inside their own property and the duty to notify. Article 17 sets the voting majorities.
The law has been amended repeatedly, including reforms on accessibility and on the treatment of tourist rentals in residential blocks, so a summary written some years ago may no longer describe the current thresholds accurately.
Individual communities also have their own statutes and internal rules registered alongside the title. Where those are stricter than the general law within the limits it allows, the stricter version is the one that binds you. Read yours before assuming the national default applies.