The Confederation of Tenants' Unions has announced the start of a campaign to organize a rent strike against the real estate company Alquiler Seguro, which it accuses of maintaining "systematic and structural" practices contrary to legality. The organization assures that this initiative comes after years of conflicts, complaints, and judicial processes related to the company's activity.
From the Confederation, they explain that the objective of the campaign is to unite the tenants who live in homes managed by the company and prepare a possible strike call. According to what they indicate, they already have hundreds of organized families, many of them affected who have gone to the unions after years of problems with the management of their rental contracts.
Fine from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs to Alquiler Seguro
The origin of the conflict is set on February 1, 2024, when the Madrid Tenants' Union filed a lawsuit in the courts and subsequently a complaint with the General Directorate of Consumer Affairs for practices such as the illegal collection of fees, the imposition of abusive clauses, or the violation of the right of withdrawal. This complaint resulted in a fine of 3.6 million euros by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, pending a final resolution.
In the sanctioning file, various irregularities in the contracts with the tenants were detailed. Among them, are “the imposition of a supposed tenant assistance service that disguises the collection from tenants of expenses that the property owner must bear, the obligation to contract home insurance (…) and an economic solvency study, as well as limiting the right of withdrawal from the contract and also imposing on tenants all expenses derived from possible judicial or extrajudicial claims”.
The resolution concludes that the company incurred six infractions classified as “very serious” and one considered “serious”, in accordance with Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, which approves the revised text of the General Law for the Defense of Consumers and Users.
How will the rent strike campaign develop?
The campaign announced by the Confederation of Tenants' Unions will have several phases. As a first step, the organization has stated that it will visit the approximately 30,000 homes managed by Alquiler Seguro throughout the state territory to inform the people living in them and organize the tenants.
As they explain from the organization, there are already hundreds of organized families, many of them affected who have contacted the unions on their own initiative. "They are tenants who have called us after years of abuses. People are fed up and want to take action," they point out.
The definitive call for the strike still has no date. The Confederation explains that it will be debated and approved in tenant assemblies once the first phase of the campaign ends, focused on contacting all affected people.
Among the demands of the movement is the recovery of money they consider unduly charged and the denunciation of what they describe as abuses in access to rental housing. “Every 5 or 7 years we are forced to disburse more than 4,000 euros to enter a rental home and rising,” they state.
What is a rent strike?
The Tenants' Union of Madrid defines a rent strike as “a form of organized civil disobedience where tenants partially or totally withhold the payment of rent as a pressure tool to resolve conflicts with landlords or denounce the structural injustice of the housing model”.
According to this organization, it is not an individual action, but a collective strategy. “It is not an individual or spontaneous action: it is a collective union strategy, which is planned, executed, and defended from the assemblies and tenants' unions,” they detail.
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The process includes different organizational phases, such as the holding of assemblies, the preparation of a housing census, the visit to neighbors to inform them of the initiative, the voting on the call, and the registration of the people participating in the strike.
Once the strike has begun, the participants inform the landlord of the suspension of rent payment, while the union organizes public actions, outreach campaigns, and new additions to the movement.
What is the Confederation of Unions of Tenants?
The Confederation of Tenants' Unions, convener of this rent strike in Spain, is a group that brings together tenants' unions from more than a dozen cities and territories of the State, among them Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza, Seville, Malaga, Ibiza, Cadiz, Asturias, Vigo, Guadalajara or Segovia.
The organization was born last year as a space for coordination of the tenant movement at the state level and aims to promote joint campaigns against the abuses of the rental market, promote the collective organization of tenants, and extend local conflicts to a state scale.
To the campaign against Alquiler Seguro have also joined the Housing Union of Murcia, LAB Etxebizitza (Euskadi), the Housing Union of Carolines (Alicante) and Right to Roof (Gran Canaria).