by Owners of private neighborhoods They are on alert due to the increase in the real estate tax of up to 200% announced by the Collection Agency of the Province of Buenos Aires (ARBA), whose invoices will begin to arrive in February.
The problem occurs in properties that still They do not have a subdivision, which leads to a good part of taxpayers paying “provincial taxes like large landowners,” they denounce. That’s because it applies to them a higher rate than if the lot were written.
The problem has been going on for several years, but sensitivity worsened since the last strong tax increase. Affected neighbors assured Clarion that the amounts they paid were not a problem for their pockets until December, something that has changed now.
Although the bills with the new import have not yet arrived, the neighbors began to calculate the amounts and in some cases they assure that they will go from paying $28,000 to $69,000 or in the greatest of cases, from $80,000 to $240,000. They also ensure that if their homes were registered They would pay a much lower rate.
The issue gained visibility after a local media outlet in Pilar published this Friday that a group of residents from the Pilar del Este area had started a petition on the Change.org platform, with the aim of gathering signatures so that ARBA modify the criteria to determine the real estate tax.
ARBA sources clarified Clarion that “no 2024 real estate tax bill has yet been issued. In relation to commercial links between individuals and with some developers, what was done was to work on the regulations to be able to facilitate subdivision and the subsequent deeding of many homes, which was an inconvenience for many families in the Province who could not write.”
The source added that “now it is in developers responsibility to be able to advance in the necessary procedures so that the neighbors can write, subdivide and already have the real estate items. “In order not to appeal to these figures of which the calculation they make to be able to collect what they award to the provincial collection agency is unknown.”
The developer of Pilar del Este is the company Eidico. Clarion He tried to obtain an official response from the company to understand the reasons why the deed of both this area of neighborhoods, as well as others, has been delayed.
There was no official communication in that sense, but as this media learned, the arguments for the delays would have to do with the clearance bureaucracy which means “register” a private neighborhood.
Sector sources explained that “real estate complexes require more than 50 procedures in various organizations, such as: roads, Municipality, Provincial Directorate of Urban and Territorial Planning (DPOUT), the Provincial Agency for Sustainable Development (OPDS) and the Water Authority (ADA) and Cadastre (ARBA)”, among others.
“Distorted” taxes
The problem arises since the neighborhoods in this area began the procedures for the deed of each property. According to neighbors, it takes around five years, which leads to everyone paying “distorted” taxes.
At the request of Change.org, the residents of Pilar del Este explained that their properties “mostly do not exceed 150 m2 and lots of around 500 m2.” And they added: “We find the dichotomy, with others consolidated neighborhoods that already have the subdivision before Revenue. Neighborhoods in the area with houses with significant surfaces of 300 m2 or more and lots of 1000 m2 are going to pay the sum of $5,000 per month as ARBA while we have already been paying $30,000 per two months,” he said.
“In our case, although the municipal proceduresand we have our own municipal item and can pay each lot its corresponding municipal tax, in the case of ARBA, this is not the case and the amount that we are going to pay soon is approximately $90,000 per two-month period,” they added in the petition.
Sonia Lorenzo, one of the owners of the neighborhood, told Clarion: “There are many owners who do not know if we will be able to pay the 200% increase proposed by the Governor. If we were subdivided, we would be paying a third of what we pay now and the increase would only be 140% on an amount much smaller than the current one.”
One of the people in charge of the neighborhood mutual benefit said that “Eidico has been delaying the processing of the deeds for 12 years. They do not want to leave the administration and the longer the feasibility process takes, the longer they will be burdened.”
According to this neighbor, “the company states that the process ‘is stopped in the Province’. And that of the ten neighborhoods managed by the developer in Pilar del Este, only one, Jazmines, is subdivided and pays around $5,000 of ARBA. ” There are 4,800 lots that are in the same situation as us,” he added.
The Pilar del Este area is not the only one affected. A resident of the San Matías neighborhood, of Ingeniero Maschwitz, assured this medium that if he paid $28,000 from ARBA, he now estimates that he will pay $69,000. “We receive 22 ballots and we divide them internally with an equation that was done here in the neighborhood. It’s all because they haven’t subdivided the land yet. “ARBA sees us as large landowners.”
In San Matías there are 1,268 owners. “We are small lands paying for huge land“, they denounced. “Some neighbors are going to pay up to $400,000. It’s crazy. I have lived here for three years, historically ARBA was always cheap, it even increased twice as much and was still cheap, but after they approved that in the Legislature it is going to increase almost three times as much,” added the neighbor.
One of the ARBA resolutions to expedite the deeds, as reported, was “that the developers of gated communities they will be separated from a tax that it would not be up to any of the parties to pay and that it led to lawsuits for non-payment. This judicialization ended up preventing the owners from being able to register their land or houses. In addition, the organization added the authorization for you to write to us “They will directly process the update of tax liability, without the need for the entity’s intervention.”
