Hélder Martins told Lusa that the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) will affect an “old practice”, in a region that has more than a third of the total of local accommodations (AL) in condominiums.

The recent STJ ruling on local accommodation implies a ban on installing this type of temporary accommodation in autonomous fractions intended for permanent housing in a horizontal property building, according to jurist Fernanda Paula Oliveira.

Público reported on Thursday that the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) standardized the jurisprudence on the possibility of coexisting, in the same building, permanent housing and temporary housing for tourist purposes, ending, according to the newspaper, “the differences in legal understanding".

Algarve issue

“Although in the Algarve the disputes between owners and owners of local accommodation (AL) are less expressive than in Lisbon and Porto (…), the numbers prove that we are the main ones affected by this ruling. These measures are aimed only at fractions in buildings subject to the horizontal property regime, that is, local accommodation in the form of an apartment”, said the president of AHETA.

The same source underlined that “of the 101,534 local accommodations registered in Portugal, 65,750 are in the form of an apartment, of which 25,000 are in the district of Faro”, a number that represents “about 25% of local accommodation in the country” and “38% of the total number of local accommodations in the form of an apartment”.

The president of AHETA considered that the ruling “reveals a total lack of knowledge on the subject and calls into question the entire sector”, also colliding with the provisions of the General Regulation of Urban Buildings (RGEU).

AHETA said that an “amendment to the law made in 2018 (Law 62/2018, of 22 August)” already provided for “mechanisms to resolve these cases of conflict between condominiums and local accommodation owners in a simple, fast and free way”, stressing that the numbers of court cases are “residual” and have been “less than 50 since 2018”.