Following the recent decision by the Supreme Court regarding the AL regime (short-term tourist-lodgings licenses), the president of the Association of Hotels and Tourist Enterprises of the Algarve (AHETA) warned today that the Algarve will be one of the “mainly affected” regions.
The new ruling, brought in as of Thursday 21st April 2022, states that no property owner can rent out a property ‘destined for habitation’ within the AL regime, even if they have an AL licence and have bookings already.
AHETA president, Hélder Martins, told Lusa news agency that the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) will affect the Algarve region severely, where more than a third of the total of local accommodations are estimated to be affected.
He went on to express that he considers that the ruling “reveals a total lack of knowledge on the subject and calls into question the entire sector”, also contradicting with the provisions of the General Regulation of Urban Buildings (RGEU).
“The obligation to change the use provided for in the constitutive title of the horizontal property (namely apartments), forcing fractions that want to carry out the activity of local accommodation to stop having a residential use, collides with a set of rules contained in the RGEU, without which a property or fraction cannot function as local accommodation”, he argued.
For Hélder Martins, these requirements “do not exist in the fractions destined for commerce and services, since they do not have kitchens, nor the necessary bathrooms, nor bedrooms, so what the judgment determines is, in practice, unfeasible. ”
AHETA said that an “amendment to the law made in 2018 (Law 62/2018, of 22 August)” already provided for “mechanisms to resolve these cases of conflict between condominiums and local accommodation owners in a simple, fast and free way”, stressing that the numbers of court cases are “residual” and have been “less than 50 since 2018”.
