Tenant's Right of First Refusal in Inheritances and Donations: The Proposal

Extending Tenant's Right of First Refusal to Inheritances and Donations

If the owner of the apartment you rent puts it up for sale, the law puts you first in line: 30 calendar days to match the offer and keep the apartment. If the owner dies, you don't exist. This asymmetry is written into the law — the right of first refusal applies to sales, not to donations or inheritances — and someone has proposed to close this gap. The idea has landed with a lit fuse: some see common sense; others, an expropriation with a tie.

What Article 25 of the LAU Says About Tenant's Right of First Refusal

The mechanism already exists and is precisely defined. Article 25 of the Urban Leases Law grants the tenant a preferential right of acquisition when the rented property is sold. This is materialized as a right of first refusal: thirty calendar days from the date they are formally notified of the decision to sell, the price, and the essential conditions of the transfer.

From this arises the proposal: if the system is already in place for sales, it is sufficient to extend it to the transfer of the property to an heir or a donee. The reasoning is that the value is already known before the tenant has a say. In a donation, it's known because the donor pays capital gains tax; in an inheritance, because the notary reflects the value at which it is inherited. Without an official figure, there is no right of first refusal, and here the figure exists.

Why Dormant Estates End Up at Auction

The scenario that carries the most weight in the argument is not the heir who moves in, but the estate that no one claims. Dormant estates due to lack of knowledge, a bad financial moment for the heir, or simply neglect, and the apartment ends up in a public auction. Those who defend the idea maintain that there are many more such cases than people realize, and in these situations, the tenant is the only one who has been paying community fees, property tax, and bathroom renovations for years.

An almost Kafkaesque detail is added to this scenario: an occupant who has been in the property for 30 years without the owner claiming it can invoke adverse possession (usucapion). It is legal, rare, and almost no one achieves it, but it exists.

The Tax Trick: Declaring a High Value to Deter the Tenant

The obvious objection is that the heir inflates the value to scare off the tenant. The response given is counterintuitive: if they inflate the price to block the right of first refusal, they then pay taxes on that inflated value. What is presented as a clever move becomes expensive. It's called a win-win: either you respect the real price and let the tenant in, or you raise it and the tax authorities send you the bill.

Expropriation or Simple Preference? The Clash Over Property

Here, consensus breaks down. One side reads it as another twist on property rights: if the owner cannot choose who to leave the apartment to in their will, they say, this is not extending a right of first refusal, it is expropriating the heir. Another current responds with the law in hand: a preferential right of acquisition does not remove ownership, it only dictates who buys and at what price. And a third warns of the collateral effect: if renting becomes harder to undo, there will be fewer apartments for rent, and those that remain will become more expensive.

The proposal, for now, is not in any draft bill. It exists only in the mind of its originator and in the discussion it has generated. Does the tenant deserve to keep the apartment when the landlord inherits, or is that something else entirely?