Tax breaks in 2017 for Marbella property owners.
It is always pleasant to be the bringer of good news and at Altavista Property we were delighted to learn about the planned tax breaks for Marbella property owners, which we’d like to share with you. Some of you will be aware that in early 2016 the Marbella Town hall scrapped the local development plan passed in 2010 (PGOU), and since then it has been working on creating a new one. In line with this, the Town Hall has announced a plan to return properties to the rateable values established in the PGOU of 1986. This follows months of working with the Cadastral Office, which is the equivalent of a land registry, to review values, and it hopes to have completed the process by March 2017 in time for implementation in the 2017 tax year. The IBI tax on property (Impuesto sobre Bienes Inmuebles) is based on the rateable value of a property and it has an effect on other taxes, such as capital gains and the tax buyers/sellers pay when a property is sold or transferred to another person. Opponents to the incumbent Marbella Town Hall had criticised what it believed was improper charges for this tax and claimed that Marbella tax payers were being overcharged by millions of euros. Setting aside the political debate, it is a move that is certainly welcome. The key issue at stake was the assertion that many properties classified in the 2010 PGOU as being on ‘building land’ were originally classified as being on ‘non-building land’ in 1986. The reason that the changes were not implemented immediately after the annulment of the PGOU 2010, is, as Marbella Town Hall has publicly explained, due to the fact that there was “physically not enough time to carry it out,” because the PGOU was only scrapped 15 days before the deadline for changes imposed by the Cadastral Office. We do not know as yet exactly which properties will benefit from these changes and we would suggest, based on information from Marbella Town Hall, that any specific quantification of tax savings is based on hearsay, since the Cadastral Office has not yet set the values. We will keep you informed once we hear more definite news, but in the meantime it seems that this is the kind of good news Marbella’s property owners would like to hear as they go into 2017.
