Regimen de Condominio, part 1
So, I have been busy the last few months trying to organize getting “Regimen de Condominio” for one of the buildings that I manage. I really don’t have to do a lot, the lawyer takes care of most of the details, but I have to be around to take orders from her. It has been a long process and I thought I would try to explain what has happened and what I have done so far, as well as what the mystical “Regimen de Condominio” really is.
Regimen de Condomino -
When you build a condominium building anywhere in the world you follow the process of purchasing the land that you are going to build on, build the building and then the separate dwellings, then you have to break the building into legal parcels for sale. The “Regimen de Condominio” is the official document that defines the legal parcels.
The building that I am getting the regimen for was started about four years ago by a group of guys from the United States. They saw potential in Playa Del Carmen and decided to exploit it for investment purposes, so they found a piece of land and started to build. They had various problems with contractors and engineers and after two years of struggling to get the building done remotely they hired my company to get it finished.
When the developers turned the building over to me some of the apartments had been presold, but some where still not finished. There were some basic infrastructure problems that had to be taken care of to make the place inhabitable, city water had to be connected and a few other major things had to be sorted out. Then I hired a crew to finish the last three apartments that were not yet done. In the middle of finishing the construction, we ran into a problem with plumbing in one of the sold apartments. Anyway, it took about a year to get the building ready to actually be functional.
During this time, a local engineer was supposedly working on getting the “Regimen de Condominio” done for the developers so that the titles for the individual apartments could be processed and the builders could turn a profit. The developers waited and waited and occasionally paid fees here and there, but this past January, the engineer just dropped off the face of the planet. We couldn’t get in touch with him, the developers couldn’t get in touch with him. Everyone was starting to get worried.
The developers finally decided to turn the process of the regimen over to us, so in early Spring of this year we brought all of the paperwork that we had to a local attorney and she agreed to do the job of restarting the Regimen. Nobody could find anything that the previous engineer had done, so we were starting from the beginning.
We had a month of measuring the building and the lot and lots of the attorney calling me for this or that paperwork. Many times I had to run to the municipal palace or the accountant or no se donde to find just the right piece of paper. Also, a lot of fees kept coming up, sometimes in Mexico fees come up that seem to need to be paid “TODAY”, so much of my job has been running here or there to get money to so-and-so.
After getting the property properly measured, the attorney worked with an engineering firm in Guadalajara to build a portfolio for the building, which turned out to be a nice leatherbound notebook about five inches thick. Every room in every apartment and every inch of common area and green area and every cistern have to be drawn up and then described in words. The book came back after another month.
The building was built on three lots, so the next step was to convert the three lots to one. This was another long process and involved an engineering team coming to measure the lots and the corners to make sure the records in the state and city registers were correct. The fusion of the lots then had to be submitted to “Catastro” which is the department of government that keeps track of the ownership of land in the city.
After the fusion of lots was done, the latest step was getting “Factabilidad” from the utilities companies. This is a written description from the water and electric departments stating the projected usage and availablility of services to the building. For the water department this included setting up a water usage contract, which is basically paying a contract fee to hook the building up to the system, which ensures a large fund for building future infrastructure in the city of Playa Del Carmen.
Now, the lawyer has to apply for a construction bond for the building, to cover anything that may happen to the apartments for a year after the titles are given. This was interesting, because very few people know that there is a recourse against faulty workmanship when they purchase a condo in Mexico. In order to get this bond, the developer’s accountant is working up a financial resume of the company and any of its assets and or business transactions in order for the bond company to get a better idea of what they are dealing with. After the bond is done, the whole package will be submitted to city and state governments for approval.
So, that is a pretty simple summation of what the regimen has been so far, I will write more when more as it happens.
