Empty flats and squatting: what the community can do

Few topics generate more alarm — and more misinformation. What a community can actually do, without the myths.

Prevention (what is genuinely in your hands)

• Serious common access: an entrance that always closes, control of keys and remotes, lighting at entry points. Opportunistic occupation comes through the open door.
• Empty flats identified: the owner contact (or bank/fund, if that is the case) located BEFORE you need it.
• Signs of life in long-empty flats: arrangements with the owner (post collected, blinds varied).

The first 24–48 hours (if it happens)

Speed is almost everything: a recent, flagrant occupation allows immediate police action — once it cools, it becomes months of proceedings. Protocol: detect → notify the owner NOW → immediate complaint by the owner (the community can report damage to common elements: a forced communal door, illegal connections to community installations).

What the community can legally do

• Report and become a party in whatever affects common elements (damage, illegal hook-ups to community electricity or water: that is a separate offence).
• Bring a cessation action for disruptive or unhealthy activities against the occupants of any flat (art. 7.2 of the horizontal property law): it is the community route when there is real disruption.
• Put institutional pressure on a passive owner (banks/funds): a certified letter demanding maintenance and the charges — which accrue and are recoverable.

What it CANNOT do

Cut off communal utilities on its own initiative, change the locks of someone else property, or neighbourhood "evictions": all of that turns the community into the defendant. Effective firmness is fast and lawful — the unlawful kind is extremely expensive.

The underlying message

A cohesive building, with well-kept access and neighbours who know each other, is statistically the poor candidate. The best anti-squatting policy is called a living community.