Defaulters have no place to hide
Owner's associations managing properties within rights to enforce payment obligations
If you own property in Dubai and have repeatedly failed to meet your obligations by way of service charges, it’s time to mend your ways. Those who continue to test the limits may soon have owners associations that have assumed responsibility for properties coming after them for overdue payments.
With that, the neighbourly atmosphere that exists in Dubai’s freehold clusters would come under severe strain. Repeated failure to meet payment obligations would also invite stiff penalties as laid out under the Strata Law. It could even have retroactive effect, as non-payments in periods before owners associations took over can also be pursued. And the “good people next door” may well be the ones taking the onus of meting out the penalties to those falling back on their obligations.
But there are things that need to be in place before owners associations can start getting tough.
Lawyers Jerry Parks
This article features Jerry Parks discussing the various aspects of enforcing payment obligations and appeared in the 25 February 2011 edition of Gulf News and is reproduced with the kind permission of the editors.
