Summer residents were prohibited from blocking roads in villages

The rules for using common property of owners have become clearer and more transparent

In October 2023, changes to the Civil Code of the Russian Federation came into force, according to which the right of common ownership of real estate owners to common property is secured and specified. We are talking about garage associations, holiday villages and apartment buildings.

Now a new paragraph has appeared in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation: “Common property of owners of immovable things.” It includes land plots, subsoil plots and everything that is firmly connected to the land, that is, objects whose movement without disproportionate damage to their purpose is impossible, including buildings, structures, unfinished construction objects, as well as residential and non-residential premises, including including garages.

According to the new rules, real estate owners now own by right of common shared ownership “property, the use of which was intended to satisfy the general needs of such owners during the creation or formation of these immovable things, as well as property acquired, created or formed subsequently for the same purpose.” In this case, the share in the ownership of the common property will be proportional to the area of ​​the property itself. That is, the owner of an apartment with an area of ​​90 square meters. m has three times more rights to common property than the owner of an apartment with an area of ​​30 square meters. m. However, rights are inseparable from responsibilities – owners will also participate in the costs and expenses of maintaining and preserving common property in proportion to their share. This will be especially relevant for summer residents when deciding questions about the fate of common property: if previously it was customary to divide the number of votes according to the number of home owners in the holiday village, now it will be necessary to look at the area of ​​their property.

This means that transferring common property, for example, for rent to someone, is possible only with the consent of all owners. As before, at least two-thirds of the votes must be collected for a quorum. To transfer it into ownership, a unanimous decision will be needed. A share in common property cannot be sold or donated; it passes to the new owner only together with the main property.

“There should not be a situation where a developer sells houses in a private village, people buy, and then it turns out that the only road to the house belongs to a private person and they have to pay for the road. And now such a situation will be impossible in principle. No one will have the right to prohibit the owner of a house from using a road in a private village, which is common property,” explains Pavel Krasheninnikov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Legislation.

However, this is all theory, and how the new system will be combined in practice with the realities of garage and garden cooperatives is not yet very clear. The first thing you have to think about is the already mentioned need to convene real general meetings of owners. Almost the majority of Moscow region (and even more so regional) GSK and SNT hold reporting and re-election meetings required by law for the sake of formality, and a significant part of the owners of dachas and garages do not even know about these meetings. And according to the new rules, either without that same quorum it will not be possible to dispose of a common well or a washing box in any way… or, on the contrary, the cunning board, accustomed to conducting “virtual” OSS, will dispose of this very property so well that just hold on. It’s not even clear which option is better, both are so good that it couldn’t be worse, and both are completely real.

Lawyers and social activists involved in housing and communal services and related topics have been saying for a long time: learn to hold general meetings, don’t be lazy about calling them and participating. The reality, however, is that full-fledged general meetings are held only in a tiny minority of apartment buildings, garages and dacha cooperatives. And it’s not that in Russia there is any particularly disdainful attitude towards decision-making, it’s more likely that most potential participants in such meetings simply don’t have time – they don’t have enough, as psychologists like to say these days, resources.

Perhaps the new order, when the weight of the vote is proportional to the volume of the share, will improve this matter: say, the owners of the largest shares in the cooperative will gather and everything with common property will be resolved without “minority shareholders”. But then again, conversations will begin about the kulaks and the rule of the strong…

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29130 dated October 6, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Good share games