One in three owners’ associations (vve) are unable to reach agreement with all residents about making their home more sustainable. This is due to the decision-making process within a VVE, concludes Vereniging Eigen Huis (VEH) published on Monday report. Owners’ associations must largely or unanimously agree to decisions about the roof, facades or windows of a residential complex. In a quarter of the cases, this leads to conflicts, which delays the sustainability process.
VEH, a lobby group for home owners, is now making an appeal to the cabinet for the first time: make it legally possible for apartment owners to install a solar panel, water pump or double glazing independently, without requiring permission from the homeowners’ association. For example, owners should only have to report to the owners’ association. VEH wants the government to investigate this possibility.
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Now it is the case that apartment owners are dependent on the judgment of other residents in the flat if they want to make an adjustment to their home. If you want a solar panel on the roof, you must first discuss this with the VVE. In the case of small VVEs (up to five apartments), the decision must be unanimous. In larger VVEs, two thirds of the residents must agree. “That makes it a difficult process, since various interests play a role within a VVE,” writes VEH director Karsten Klein. “Someone who is already old may not want to invest in a hybrid heat pump that pays for itself in fifteen years.”
Surgery without permission
Especially within small VVEs, sustainability is lagging behind, “because they would rather keep the peace than have to argue about whether or not to have solar panels on the roof”, according to the survey among more than 1,000 apartment owners. There are about 700,000 apartment owners in the Netherlands and about 140,000 VVEs, according to the Land Registry in 2016.
About nine percent of the owners within a small VVE sometimes choose to carry out a sustainable intervention with their own hands, without permission. That is not without risk, says Klein. “If the VVE board gets wind of this, they can decide that the resident will pay again if the VVE decides later to make the entire building more sustainable. Or they demand that the measures be reversed.”