What to do when there's an urgent incident in an owners' community

This guide refers to owners' communities (comunidades de propietarios) in Spain and to the Spanish Horizontal Property Act (Ley de Propiedad Horizontal, LPH).

Saturday, 11:40 pm. A resident posts in the building's WhatsApp group: water is seeping out from under the meter room door. The community president forwards the message to the property manager. The property manager reads it on Monday at 9:00. By then, the water has reached the garage.

This isn't a lack of goodwill. It's a process problem: the emergency is spotted late, triaged by gut feeling and reported through channels nobody watches at night. This guide explains what to do in the first hour, what the law says and how to design a system that doesn't depend on someone checking their phone.

What counts as an urgent incident (and what doesn't)

An incident is urgent when it meets at least one of three criteria: it puts people at risk, it causes damage that gets worse by the hour, or it leaves residents without an essential service.

The usual problem: for the person reporting it, almost everything is urgent. For the person receiving 40 messages a day, almost nothing seems to be.

What the law says about urgent repairs

Article 20.c of the LPH tasks the property manager with looking after the building's upkeep, ordering urgent repairs and measures and immediately informing the president or, where appropriate, the owners.

Three key points for your firm:

• You don't have to wait for the owners' meeting. Necessary maintenance work is mandatory without a prior resolution (art. 10.1 LPH). A genuine emergency entitles you to act.
• Acting without informing is only half the job. The duty is twofold: order the repair and report it to the president straight away.
• If there's no property manager, the president performs those duties unless the bylaws or the owners' meeting say otherwise (art. 13.5 LPH).

In Catalonia, communities are governed by Book Five of the Catalan Civil Code, which also gives the property manager authority over urgent works, with immediate notice to the president.

Protocol for the first 60 minutes

1. Protect people. If there's physical risk (gas, fire, structural damage, someone trapped), call 112 before anyone else.
2. Contain the damage. Close the main stopcock, switch off the circuit breaker for the affected area and cordon it off.
3. Document it. Photos and video with the time, exact location and apparent source. Without them, the insurance claim gets complicated.
4. Call the on-call contractor. Plumbing, electrics, lifts or locksmith, as needed. Keep the 24-hour contacts at hand before you need them.
5. Open a claim with the community's insurer. Many policies include a 24-hour assistance service that sends a repairer.
6. Inform the president and affected residents. It's a legal obligation, and it saves you 20 phone calls the next day.

The four most expensive mistakes

• Letting whoever shouts loudest decide what's urgent. A persistent resident can make an old damp patch look like an emergency, while a real leak arrives in a timid message.
• Scattered channels. Personal WhatsApp, email, a call to the account manager's mobile. Nobody has the full picture.
• Leaving no trail. Without a record of who reported what, when and what was done, an argument at the next owners' meeting is guaranteed.
• Depending on office hours. Leaks don't respect your firm's opening hours.

The real bottleneck: who decides what's urgent

In most firms the flow goes like this: a resident reports, someone at the office reads the message, decides whether it's urgent and calls the contractor. Every step depends on someone being available.

At Wabee we turn it around. The owner reports the incident with a photo and description, from the app or via WhatsApp. The AI classifies urgency using consistent criteria, not the tone of the message, and contacts the contractor without the property manager having to step in. The firm and the president receive the alert with everything documented: who reported it, at what time, which photo they sent and who was called.

The property manager stops being the funnel every breakdown has to pass through and starts supervising the process instead.

Quick checklist for your firm

• List of 24-hour on-call contractors per community and trade
• Policy number and assistance line for each community's insurer
• Documented location of stopcocks and electrical panels
• A single reporting channel for residents
• Written criteria for what counts as urgent
• Template for notifying the president

Frequently asked questions

Can the property manager order an urgent repair without calling an owners' meeting? Yes. Article 20.c LPH empowers them to order urgent repairs, with the duty to inform the president immediately.

Who decides whether a breakdown is urgent? Legally, the property manager. In practice, it pays to have written criteria (risk to people, progressive damage, essential service) so the decision doesn't depend on who reports it.

What happens if there's no property manager? The president takes on those duties, unless the bylaws or the owners' meeting have provided otherwise (art. 13.5 LPH).

What should I do if the incident happens outside office hours? Contain the damage, call the insurer's assistance service and document everything. A reporting system that classifies and routes incidents automatically means you don't depend on someone being online.

How many urgent incidents in your portfolio went through someone's personal phone this month? See how Wabee classifies and routes incidents without the property manager becoming the bottleneck. Book a demo

Keep reading

• How to automate incident reporting in residential communities
• Emergency protocol for property managers (with checklist)

Sources

• Spanish Horizontal Property Act 49/1960, consolidated text (BOE, in Spanish) — arts. 10.1, 13.5 and 20.c
• Article 20 LPH with commentary (Conceptos Jurídicos, in Spanish)