Absence from a meeting is not neutrality. It is a vote, just not yours.
Oren is an operations manager at a software company, forty-seven, the kind who manages his finances in one tidy Excel spreadsheet. In 2019 he bought a three-room apartment in Bucharest, seventy-two square meters in an established building in the Aviatei area, for 92 thousand euros. He didn't get carried away. He checked, compared, visited twice, and chose a building that seemed well kept to him.
Since then the rent came in every month. A local management company dealt with the tenant, collected, and transferred. Seven years without a single problem. Oren visited there a total of twice, both times in the first two years. It was exactly the investment he wanted: one that demands nothing of him.
In spring 2026 he decided to sell. He found a buyer at 145 thousand, agreed on a price, and set a date at the notary.
Then the notary asked for the confirmation from the owners' association.
In Romania this is not a ceremony. A notary will not authenticate a sale in a shared building without written confirmation from the association that the seller has paid all of his debts. The confirmation arrived, and in it a sum. A debt in Oren's name, which had been growing for more than a year.
Oren sent me a message at eight in the evening. “Ilan, the notary stopped the deal. They say I owe the building committee. What building committee?”
The next day I pulled an extract from the Land Registry. The second surprise was waiting there: a mortgage registered on the apartment in favor of the owners' association. Not a bank. The building.
I asked the local office to contact the chair of the residents' association and ask for the meeting minutes, and the story was uncovered in two lines.
In June 2024 a general meeting was convened to approve a renovation: waterproofing and facade repair, replacement of the elevator, and a new intercom system. Total cost, about forty thousand euros. At the first meeting, eleven owners out of twenty-eight showed up. No quorum. Nine days later a repeat meeting was convened. This time nine showed up. The decision was passed with seven votes.
Oren's share, according to his ownership proportion in the common property, came to about 2,100 euros. By the day the notary asked, interest had added another 1,780 or so.
Now to the part Oren didn't know, and most Israeli investors in Romania don't know.
A general meeting's decision is binding from the moment it is posted on the building's notice board. It binds everyone, including those who weren't present and those who are not members of the association. Nobody is obliged to chase you.
But there is a flip side, and that is what worked in our favor. At a repeat meeting a decision can be made with any number of participants, on one condition: that there is proof that all members were summoned. Either in a signed summons sheet, or by registered mail with proof of delivery, and in parallel posting on the board. In Oren's file, his name was on the sheet. No signature. No registered letter. The address the association held for him was the apartment itself, where a tenant lived who threw the note away.
And a second thing: replacing an elevator and a new intercom are not “repairs.” They are modernization, and for modernization Romanian law requires the consent of two thirds of all owners. Two thirds of twenty-eight is nineteen. There were seven.
I sat across from Oren and had to tell him the less pleasant part too. A suit to annul the decision does not freeze it. The renovation was done, the scaffolding came down a year ago, the elevator works, and his tenant rides in it every day. Even if we won, we wouldn't get back money that was invested in walls he benefits from.
So I went for something narrower.
What I didn't tell Oren right away is that even if the chair of the association wanted to forgive the interest, he couldn't. Under the law, interest funds go into a designated fund, and may be spent only on defined things. Forgiveness is a decision for a full general meeting. Another meeting, another quorum, another two months.
What is within the committee's authority is to correct a miscalculation. And that was the point. Late-payment interest starts running only thirty days after the payment due date, and the due date is set by the day the list of payments was delivered to the apartment owner. No list was ever delivered to Oren. Not by mail, not by email, not by phone. The first delivery date was the day the confirmation for the notary was issued.
I wrote a letter to the chair and to the association's attorney. I detailed the summons defect, the two-thirds issue, and the interest calculation, and proposed that they correct only the third.
The attorney understood the exposure immediately. If the decision falls, it falls against all twenty-eight owners, and the association has already paid the contractor. Correcting an interest calculation for one owner costs them far less.
The arrangement was closed in under two weeks. Oren paid the principal in full, 2,100 euros that were his anyway. The interest was recalculated from the actual delivery date and came down to 310 euros. The mortgage was removed from the extract within ten days, as the law requires.
The deal closed, six weeks late. The buyer took advantage of the delay and knocked two thousand euros off the price.
Oren said to me at the end: “For seven years I didn't get so much as one email from that building.” I told him that was exactly the point. He had never given them an address they could send to.
The question I would ask in your place
- Who makes decisions about the common property in my building, and how exactly are they supposed to notify me?
- Which address is registered with the association: mine, or the apartment where the tenant lives?
- When did I last see a meeting minute from my building, and if never, who voted in my place?
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית