Condominium fees

Permilagem expresses your unit's relative weight in the value of the whole building, in thousandths. It is fixed in the título constitutivo da propriedade horizontal, the deed that creates the condominium, and repeated in your purchase deed. Across every unit it adds up to exactly one thousand.

It does not necessarily track floor area. A high floor with good light can carry a higher permilagem than a ground-floor apartment of the same size, because what the constituting deed fixed was relative value rather than square metres.

The common reserve fund is compulsory in Portugal and exists to pay for the building's conservation works. Each owner contributes at least 10% of their share of the remaining condominium expenses.

The preposition matters: it is a percentage of the share, which means it is added to the figure the budget produces and is not contained within it. Getting that the wrong way round is the commonest error in this calculation, and it always gives a figure below the real one.

The fund is held in its own bank account and administered by the owners' meeting. It is not the administrator's float and not money available for day-to-day spending.

Expenses the meeting apportions on some basis other than permilagem. Owners can resolve that lifts are not paid for by ground-floor units, or that certain charges are split equally between units, and in those cases the simple proportion stops giving the exact number.

Extraordinary works approved outside the annual budget, which generate additional charges, and arrears from other owners, which in practice press on the condominium's cash position.

For a buyer this is worth doing beforehand: the charge sits in the monthly cost of the home next to the mortgage payment and the insurance. So is reading the minutes of the last owners' meeting, which usually say more about a building than a viewing does.