'Increase in abandoned apartments in Serbia: why aren't owners renting them out?'

In Serbia, 3.6 million apartments have been censused, and about 70 percent of them are inhabited. Compared to the 2011 census, the number of empty apartments has increased by about 10,000 to 123,000 - most of them are in Western, Southern and Eastern Serbia.

What did the census of apartments show on the ground? "What we wanted to find out with this census were apartments in villages, that is, abandoned houses. In urban areas, 20 percent of apartments are empty, which means that one in five apartments were censused in urban areas," emphasizes Dejana Ђorђeviћ from the Statistical Office, reports RTS.

In accordance with the law, the building manager must keep a record of the apartments rented out, together with the correspondence of the tenants. On''In practice this, they say, is impossible. Building managers explain that they have no right to enter the apartments or check who lives in them, but only to represent their interests in maintaining the building.

Why are the apartments vacant? Professional property manager Uroš Ђakoviћ says that in one high-rise building on New Belgrade, out of 120 apartments, as many as seven are unoccupied. "We have a situation where apartments in luxury buildings are empty. We have a client who bought a residential property and lives abroad, and this property is actually empty.

Many houses and''apartments are empty because of unresolved property relations, and there are also empty government apartments for which there is no accurate documentation. "It seems that people who have extra money, who have to invest it somehow, are buying apartments they don't live in, don't even want to rent them out because they don't need the money, and as a result this has raised apartment prices and created a big problem for people who might have wanted to buy an apartment with their salary," says lawyer Jovanka Zečević.

There are 10,000 empty apartments in Belgrade. A census has revealed that there are more than 10,000 empty apartments in Belgrade alone. 'That's half a million square meters, and if we turned that into capital, it would be five billion euros of capital. We have in Serbia''it is possible to buy real estate even if you are a foreigner. People from Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina have bought the most in our capital," emphasizes architect Daniela Rabrenovic.

She notes that all these apartments have an owner, whether it is a private person, the firm that built the apartments or the state. "The state should seriously address these issues, conduct a serious analysis," Rabrenovic said.

Spain has solved the decades-old problem of empty apartments by cutting taxes for owners to 70 percent if they rent to young people under 25. Less tax also awaits owners who provide properties to the state in a social housing subsidy program. On the other hand,''owners who have more than four properties pay more tax if one of the properties has been empty for more than two years.