Good Morning!!
I hope you had a sublime weekend!
I leave you with this video where you are going to find incredible tools for Real Estate buying or selling!
Expect 2 more parts soon! Do great!
Truly yours,
Santiago Lampón
PROPERTY TAXES IN PR – POTENTIAL LIABILITIES
Hello and welcome to Puerto Rico Legal Video Blog. My name is Santiago Lampón. I am a lawyer and a notary in Puerto Rico. I handle real estate closes week in, week out, all the time, and I am going to cover in this video and I probably have to break it down in three parts. One of the main issues and I am not kidding, one of the main issues we are facing now a days with regards to closing in general and the liability of a seller and a liability of a buyer.
Property taxes. This is a very sour subject in Puerto Rico closings now a days. It has been for a while. In the sense that it has been getting a little bit like annoying little by little. Now it is a very critical item. Property taxes in Puerto Rico very unfortunately are not really organized the way it is handled. The process is very simple and very straight forward and I am going to have to say it works. What doesn’t work is how the system is handled. Property taxes in Puerto Rico have a separate agency which is The Centre for Collection of Municipal Taxes, that’s the translation in English. In Spanish is “Centro para la Recaudación de Impuestos Municipales, and we call it CRIM.
CRIM records work separately than property registry records. They register the same, which property, the characteristics of the property and who the owner is or are, but they have several records on is here. They haven’t been put together or whatever. The problem is for example when you go to do a mortgage if the CRIM records do not match the property registry records you cannot get a mortgage. An example, the meters at the property registry are 800 meters, but when you go to CRIM its 802 meters, 850 meters, 1000 meters. The mere fact that their different you cannot get a mortgage. You need to correct either one, whichever is the correct one. That means you must do certain steps including hiring a surveyor, most likely going to the land permit authority, maybe even to having to execute deed. Eventually you will have to execute a deed if you are going to go to the property registry and you are going to the CRIM registry description is fine then it is fine. Finding old documents of agencies that no longer exist is a huge hassle. So, what I am going to do is I am going to record and by the time you watch this I will have it recorded, a series of videos describing the different issues and indicating some basic solutions.
Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to give you the full scope of solutions though videos. I am just going to be able to present you a little bit of the problem or maybe the whole picture of the problem, I will try, and an understanding of what needs to be done to correct it. By the way I want to thank my client Scott Hardy who presented me with the problem and he then suggested that maybe I should be recording videos about this. He follows me on my page; he is from Candid Real Estate. Scott, thank you.
This was part one of a series of videos regarding the property tax authority assess registration, assessment and invoicing. Those are the three main areas. I am going to be in those three areas. So, expect to see three additional videos. If you have any questions after you watch this video or after you watch the other videos and this time I do encourage you to watch all of them. Please send me an email, the address will appear on your screen or give me a call or just post the questions on this page and I will try to get to it as soon as possible.
Hope you have a great day and again my name is Santiago Lampón, a lawyer and a notary in Puerto Rico. Bye.