Condo boards in Portugal want one insurance policy per building, and the law still says no
Six months after the storms, the association of condominium administrators is pushing for a single policy per building instead of one per apartment, to unblock claims on shared parts.
If your building took a beating in the winter storms and the insurance claim is still crawling along, there is a legal reason for that — and now a proposal to fix it. The association representing condominium management firms in Portugal spent this week arguing that each building should carry a single insurance policy instead of the current tangle.
Why does one building have so many insurance policies?
Because the law says so. A building carries as many policies as it has units — thirty apartments, thirty policies, potentially thirty different insurers. For the inside of each flat that works fine. The trouble starts when the damage is to shared parts: the roof, the facade, the stairwell, the lift. Then every owner has to file their own claim, and it takes only a handful of people who are abroad or simply not paying attention to jam the whole thing for months.
That is precisely what played out after the storms. Six months on, there are buildings still chasing enough individual claims to repair things that belong to everyone and to nobody in particular.
What changes with a single condominium policy?
One policy for the building, one point of contact, one claim. The association’s president puts it bluntly: making the policy single for the building would solve this. In practice the administrator would file on behalf of the condominium and the repair would go ahead without waiting on the goodwill of thirty people.
There are obvious trade-offs still to be argued out — who picks the insurer, how the premium is split between units of different sizes, what happens to owners who already hold better cover. None of it is law yet; it is a proposed amendment, and the condo-management sector already has other changes in play, including licensing and mandatory professional liability cover for administrators.
File this next to the climate risks Portuguese buyers now weigh before signing. Buying well is no longer just the floor plan and the price — it is working out who pays when the roof gives way, and how long before somebody actually gets it fixed. The general rules on home insurance are set out on the ASF consumer portal.
Image: Harvey Barrison from Massapequa, NY, USA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
