Just in time for the start of carnival, the government in the Council of Ministers passed the 2015 housing law amendment, which is intended to eliminate significant ambiguities in tenancy law and home ownership law.

 

The two main changes concern, on the one hand, the solution to the question of bearing costs in connection with the operation and maintenance of heating boilers in rental properties; The amended version of the Tenancy Law (MRG) will contain an express regulation according to which the landlord is now expressly obliged to maintain heating boilers, but the tenant must continue to bear the annual maintenance costs.
On the other hand, a gap in the Condominium Ownership Act (WEG) regarding the ownership of accessories to the main property is closed. In this context, the Supreme Court (OGH) had ruled that if accessory objects such as cellar compartments, car parking spaces or garden areas are not separately registered in the land register, they are to be viewed as a general part of the property and would therefore be owned jointly by all apartment owners.
Since around a million apartment owners would have lost the accessory apartment property assigned to them with such a legal interpretation, legal clarification was urgently needed. The amendment that has now been adopted stipulates that the effective establishment of accessory residential property does not require entry in the land register, provided that the assignment to the respective residential property is clear from the documents in the land register (in particular the residential property contract or the utility value report).
The provisions of the amendment to the MRG and WEG are intended to apply from March 1, 2015, but are designed to apply (partly) retroactively. In the following Long text we will explain the two previously mentioned changes in more detail.

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