Owners of private neighborhoods are on alert after the increase in the real estate tax of up to 200% announced by the Collection Agency of the Province of Buenos Aires (ARBA), whose bills will begin to arrive in February.
The problem occurs in properties that do not yet have subdivision, which leads to a good part of taxpayers paying "provincial taxes like large landowners," they denounce. This is because they are charged a higher rate than if the lot were deeded.
The problem has been going on for several years, but sensitivity has intensified since the last sharp increase in the tax. Affected neighbors assured Clarín that the amounts they paid were not a problem for their pockets until December, something that has now changed.
Although the ballots with the new amount have not yet arrived, the neighbors began to calculate the amounts and in some cases assure that they will go from paying $28,000 to $69,000 or in the best of cases, from $80,000 to $240,000. They also claim that if their homes were deeded, 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 of the Pilar del Este area had started a petition on the Change.org platform, with the aim of gathering signatures so that ARBA modifies the criteria for determining the real estate tax.
The ARBA tax increase was announced in recent days and the ballots will arrive with the increase in February.
ARBA sources clarified to Clarín that "it has not yet issued any 2024 real estate tax ticket. In relation to the commercial links between individuals and with some developers, what was done was to work on the regulations to facilitate the subdivision and subsequent deed of many homes, which was an inconvenience for many families in the Province who could not deed them."
The source added that "now it is the responsibility of the developers to be able to advance in the necessary procedures so that the neighbors write, subdivide and can already have the real estate items. So as not to appeal to these figures, of which the calculation they make to be able to collect what they allocate to the provincial collection agency is unknown."
The developer of Pilar del Este is the company Eidico. Clarín tried to get 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 regard, but according to what this media outlet was able to learn, the arguments for the delays would have to do with the bureaucracy of authorizations that means "registering" a private neighborhood.
Sources from the sector explained that "real estate complexes require more than 50 procedures in various agencies, 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 with the procedures for the deed of each property. According to neighbors, it takes about five years, which leads to "distorted" taxes being paid by everyone.
In the petition for 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 ourselves with the dichotomy, with other consolidated neighborhoods that already have the subdivision before Rentas. Neighborhoods in the area with houses of significant areas 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," they said.
"In our case, although the municipal procedures have been completed, and we have our own municipal item being able to 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 months," they added in the petition.
Sonia Lorenzo, one of the owners of the neighborhood, told Clarín: "There are many of us who do not know if we are going to be able to pay the 200% increase that the governor proposed. If we were subdivided, we would be paying a third of what we pay now and the increase would only be 140% on a much smaller amount than the current one."
One of the leaders of the neighbourhood mutual said that "Eidico has been delaying the processing of the deeds for 12 years. They don't want to leave the administration and the longer the feasibility process takes, the longer they will be in charge."
A view of the San Matías neighborhood in Escobar, where neighbors suffer from the problem.
According to this neighbor, "the company states that the process 'is slowed down in the Province'. And that of the ten neighborhoods that the developer manages in Pilar del Este, only one, Jazmines, is subdivided and they pay around $5,000 from 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 told this newspaper that from paying $28,000 from ARBA he now estimates that he will pay $69,000. "We received 22 ballots and we divided them internally with an equation that was made here in the neighborhood. It's all because they haven't subdivided the land yet. ARBA sees us as big landowners."
There are 1,268 homeowners in San Matías. "We are small plots of land paying for huge plots of land," they denounced. "Some neighbors are going to pay up to $400,000. It's crazy. I've been living here for three years, historically ARBA was always cheap, it even doubled and it was still cheap, but after they approved that in the Legislature it's going to increase almost threefold," the neighbor added.
One of ARBA's resolutions to expedite the deeds, he reported, was "that the developers of gated communities dissociate themselves from a tax that was not due to any of the parties and that led to lawsuits for non-payment. This judicialization ended up preventing the owners from being able to deed their land or houses. In addition, the agency added the authorization for notaries to directly process the update of tax liability, without the need for the intervention of the entity."
PS