Hi there,
In this post I want to tell you about our horrible experience with the Municipal Chamber of Porto after we realized that we had been scammed with the purchase of the house.
As soon as we bought the house, we went to the Municipal Chamber to apply for residency. The man who attended us was unfriendly and petulant. The only person so far who has treated us badly in a public body. Even so, in 20 minutes we already had the residence certificate.
After we found out that we had been scammed and the lawyer explained to us what the documentation was that the notary João Valente had to give us when making the purchase of the property, I began to make claims through the portal of the Municipality of Porto.
The answers were always very vague, and they told me to go directly to their offices.
On November 24, 2022, I went to request the building permit, the use license, and the house plan.
In Portugal, when you are going to do renovations in your house, you must notify the Municipal Chamber of Porto and they will generate a licença de obras.
If the renovation is important and the structure of the house is modified, then they generate a new license for use.
In the purchase and sale contract that João Valente made, it is written that the house does not need a license for use since it was built before 1951.
Even if that were true, the notary would still have had to go to the Municipal Chamber to request the official document to verify this information and he would have had to give it to me at the time of signing.
The next day an official called me to tell me that they did not have the plan of the building and that they would have to do a deeper search in the cartographic records.
These are the photos that appear on Google from when they did the renovation works:
In fact, if you see the photos, the former owners illegally renovated 2 houses, mine and the one next door.
On December 2, they call me again to tell me that there is no document for my house, neither a license for use, nor a building license, nor a plan.
On December 7, two officials came to do the inspection and told me that a part of the house had been built illegally and that in order to have a valid licença de utilização, I would have to demolish the part of the house that was built illegally.
On January 25, 2023, I went to the Municipal Chamber to pick up the documentation that I had requested.
They gave me a certificate stating that my house could not have a license for use since renovation works had been carried out illegally. In addition, they gave me a plan showing the part of the house that had been built illegally.
The official who assisted us said that now we had to hire an architect to evaluate the part built illegally and to apply for legalization. From there, the Municipal Chamber of Porto would generate a building license and a new utilization license. This process takes about a year.
I asked what action they were taking against the former owners as they had not only scammed me but acted illegally. The answer was that they did absolutely nothing, they did not penalize, fine or anything.
Diego told her: “So now I can do all the illegal renovation works I want in my house because you are not going to fine me.”
Although the official did not respond, the answer is yes.
In fact, if you look at the map, all the houses that are around mine also have illegal constructions and regarding that, the Municipal Chamber of Porto does absolutely nothing.
The two officials who had visited my house had already told me that in my area there probably wasn’t even a house that was legal.
Let me explain something important, the illegal situation in which the house is right now, despite being a very serious crime on the part of the people who sold it to us, did not prevent us from continuing to live there, nor did it affect us to continue leading a normal life at home.
The big problem is that we could neither sell nor rent the house because it was an illegal house.
I could do it with a corrupt real estate company and a corrupt notary, which, as you have seen, is what is left over in Porto, but I wanted to have everything legal, as I have always done.
Since legalizing that part of the house was going to be very expensive and we were still making arrangements, we decided to leave this for later.
A month later, I received an email from the Municipal Chamber of Porto in which it said that I owed 22 euros for the documents that they had given me and that, if I did not pay, they would close the case.
Why didn’t they charge me when they gave me the documentation in the first place? Someone had made a mistake and it hadn’t been me.
Second, if they already told me that they were unable to take any action to penalize the former owners, what case were they going to close? Not that an investigation was being done.
I was going to answer, but I decided not to waste my time any more than I already had.
On March 3, 3 officials from the Municipal Chamber of Porto knocked on my door; they wanted to inspect my house again.
Without understanding what they wanted, and since they had not bothered to call to ask if they could come to my house, I showed them the documentation that their colleagues had given me.
The one who seemed to be the head of the group told me that she was the one who had to see if these renovations should be legalized or not, because they “didn’t even know what was in the house before.”
As soon as the woman entered, she began to talk about the painting and that we had to notify that we were painting.
There Diego was outraged and became hysterical. He told her that if she didn’t know what was here before, she also didn’t know what color the house had before. He told her to see what she had to see and not to bother us about the painting.
They took a couple of photos and left.
Here I must note that the excuse they have always made regarding their inability to fine or penalize the criminals who sold us the house is that “they do not have enough personnel to be verifying all the renovation works.”
Even so, the first time two people came and the second time, 3 came. If instead of visiting in groups, they visited a property one at a time, they would be more efficient and productive.
On March 8, they sent me an email with a document in which they tell me that the only license for the use of the house is from 1915 and they explain how to legalize the part of the house that was built illegally.
So, they washed their hands.
With that operational incompetence, I’m not surprised that people do illegal renovations in their homes. At the time of publishing this post, in my street illegal renovation works are taking place in 3 houses.
Since they “could only act if a neighbor reported the illegal works”, I decided to report one and nothing happened, no one from the Porto Municipal Chamber showed up to investigate, fine, penalize or anything. To this day they continue to renovate the building illegally without any problem or concern.
As I had to notify about the painting, one weekend I went to the website to send the notification. I figured it would be something simple. We spent 3 hours searching the web for how to do it and then it turns out that since we don’t belong to the center of Porto, we don’t have to notify anything.
This is how well the Municipal Chamber of Porto works.
You cannot imagine how helpless and frustrated I feel that this has happened to us in a country where, apparently, there is no law or justice, where public bodies wash their hands of illegalities.
But the story does not end there, months later they sent me an email saying that they are going to come to my house to do a topographical record on June 13 at 9:30 a.m. There was no way to respond to the email and no one bothered to call me to ask for my authorization and ask for my availability. That day I was not at home all day and in the afternoon they called me.
I asked them if this topographical record was to legalize the situation of the house and they told me that it was only for “fiscalization”. In other words, the Municipal Chamber wanted to make me pay taxes for an illegal construction that we didn’t know if we were going to have to demolish in the future. If they themselves had told me that likely it would have to be demolished, how was I going to pay taxes for that?
I would like to know if the Municipal Chamber does a topographical record of each of the houses with illegal constructions for “fiscalization”. Probably not.
An architect that I contacted went to the Municipal Chamber to see what really had to be done in my house and it turns out that they found a cartographic record from the 40s in which the annex that supposedly had been illegally built did exist; so the legalization process would not be so traumatic and the option of demolishing would disappear.
But the thought remains that the incompetents could tell me to demolish a part of the house when they had not even investigated the cartographic records well.