Property management in Colombia

Ley 675 divides direction and administration three ways, and much of the internal friction comes from not being clear that the council does not manage day to day, and the administrador cannot decide anything the law reserves to the assembly.

This is the point that sets Colombia apart from the rest of the region, and the reason this is not just another row in a vocabulary glossary: as soon as the reglamento is registered, a non-profit civil legal entity is born, separate from each individual owner. It takes the building's name, and its assets are the ordinary and extraordinary fees, fines, interest and the fondo de imprevistos (contingency fund).

In practice this means the administrador does not act personally or on behalf of a loose group of "owners": they act as the legal representative of that entity, and the contracts they sign in that role belong to it, not to them. That is what lets the entity sue a non-paying owner in the building's own name, without every other owner having to be a party to the case.

The entity is also treated as a non-taxpayer for national taxes and for the industria y comercio tax on activity tied to its purpose — managing the shared property and services — which surprises anyone arriving from a market where the building is not a separate taxable party at all.

A council of administration does not always exist. In residential-use buildings it is optional — the bylaws decide whether to create one. It is mandatory in commercial or mixed-use buildings with more than thirty private units, not counting parking spaces or storage units.

Where it exists, it deliberates and decides with a majority of its members present — unless the bylaws require a higher quorum — and its votes are counted by head, not by co-ownership coefficient the way the assembly's are. What it cannot do, whatever the bylaws might suggest in practice, is take decisions the law reserves to the assembly: setting or raising fees, imposing sanctions the bylaws do not already provide for, or amending the bylaws themselves.

The fee is calculated on each unit's coeficiente de copropiedad — the percentage the deed assigns it of the whole — and splits into the expensa ordinaria, the month's predictable running cost, and the extraordinaria, approved by the assembly for something specific. An extraordinary charge that exceeds four times the monthly necessary expenses over the budget period needs a 70% qualified majority of the coefficients, not the simple majority an ordinary decision takes.

The law also requires a fondo de imprevistos, funded by a surcharge of at least 1% of the annual common-expense budget plus fines and interest. The assembly can suspend that charge once the fund has accumulated half of the year's ordinary budget, and the administrador can only spend from it with the assembly's prior approval.

As anywhere in the region, this is the problem every administrador names first. The Colombian difference is the tool: article 48 of Ley 675 turns the administrador's own debt certificate into a título ejecutivo — an enforceable instrument — with no promissory note, no bill of exchange, no document signed by the owner, and no prior declaratory judgment establishing the debt.

With that certificate the administrador can go straight to a civil judge and file for enforcement, and the law lets them do it on their own initiative, without asking the assembly or the council for authorisation. The right to collect each individual fee lapses five years after it became due, running fee by fee — letting arrears age without acting is what eventually closes that route off.

Before it reaches a courtroom, most of it is resolved the same way it is everywhere: a bill that arrives on time, a reminder before the due date, and somewhere an owner can check their balance without walking down to the front desk.

The asamblea ordinaria meets at least once a year, convened by the administrador with at least fifteen calendar days' notice, to approve accounts and the budget. If nobody convenes it, it meets anyway, by operation of law, on the first business day of the fourth month after the budget period ends.

It sits validly with more than half of the coefficients present and decides with half plus one of those represented, except for ten decisions the law reserves to a 70% qualified majority of the building's entire coefficients — among them amending the bylaws, releasing a common asset from that status, or dissolving the property. No decision, other than winding up the propiedad horizontal itself, can require more than 70%: a bylaw that sets a higher bar is treated as if it were never written.

Decisions taken under the law and the bylaws bind every owner, including those who were absent or voted against. That is what makes a badly convened assembly so costly: an irregular notice voids everything it approved.

Ask an administrador in Bogotá, Medellín or Cali where the week goes and the answer is rarely the report to the council. It is the chat.

The pattern repeats building by building: one WhatsApp group per tower carrying the management's notice, a noise complaint and the same question — what do I owe, when is the elevator technician coming, what do the bylaws say about pets — asked again by a different owner. The request that actually needed a council decision sits three screens up.

The cost is not only the administrador's time. It is that the building keeps no record of anything. When the administración changes, that history does not carry over, and the council starts asking everything from scratch.

Eloria handles that part and not the others: it does not replace the entity's accounting or the management software the administración already uses.

Owners write on WhatsApp, where they already are. Eloria answers from the building's own information — the reglamento de propiedad horizontal, common-area hours, current notices — opens a case when a vendor or a council decision is needed, and escalates it. Everything is recorded per unit and per case, so the history survives a change of administrador.

It speaks the building's own vocabulary — propiedad horizontal, copropietarios, cuota de administración, cartera — rather than a translation of what another market calls the same thing.