If you are an owner at Bom Sucesso, you already know the feeling. It seems like the Administration operates as kings in their own castle, dictating exactly what we can and cannot do with our private gardens, houses, and commercial spaces. And it is even more frustrating to see how they simply pass the crown among themselves from one corporate manager to the next.

A Kingdom Built From the Beginning 

To understand how we got here, we have to look at the foundational rules. If you look at the original Resort rulebook from 2007, it explicitly dictates that the corporate “tourist operator” serves as the permanent administrator “without a time limit.”

This means the private owners have never had a democratic say or a ballot box to elect who manages the resort. Because the rules legally lock in the corporate entity rather than a specific person, the operator is free to appoint or swap out whoever they want to represent them. They never need to hold an election to ask for our permission when leadership changes. They simply pass the crown among themselves behind closed doors—as we saw recently when management suddenly shifted from Pedro Portugal to Roberto Solis, Eduardo Montenegro and Sergio, and notify the owners after the fact. The faces change, but the castle’s throne was designed from day one to remain permanently out of our reach.

The rules that were strict from the beginning

Many owners assume that the resort’s incredibly strict aesthetic and behavioral rules were made more strict recently. But if you look at the original documents, those rules were also written into the Administration Regulations from the very beginning. Since the original 2007 rulebooks, we were strictly forbidden from altering the exterior color of our houses or changing the garden layout without prior written permission. The rules banned installing anything with exterior visibility, including outdoor furniture, awnings, or clothes racks.

2015: When the Condominium Claimed the Crown 

What actually changed in 2014 and 2015 wasn’t the text of these behavioral rules; it was the Administration’s power to ruthlessly enforce them. Here is the story of how the Administration bypassed our private justice system, rigged the legal playing field, and created the unbalanced reality we live with today.

Originally, the resort’s rules required that any dispute, including the collection of condominium debts or punishing rule-breakers, had to be submitted to a private Arbitration Tribunal (a private court where people or companies solve disputes without going to a normal government court) in Porto. While the original rules already gave the Administration the unchecked power to act as the “police” (allowing them to confiscate items or destroy garden alterations without prior notice), the Administration realized the Arbitration requirement completely paralyzed their ability to quickly collect money. They were looking for a way to bypass the expensive Arbitration Tribunal so they could use cheap public courts to act as the “judge” for collecting debts.

The Loophole: Erasing the 75% Supermajority 

Fundamentally changing the BSR rulebook to strip away owner protections was designed to be nearly impossible. The founding 2007 rulebooks explicitly stated that altering the regulations required a massive supermajority of 75% (three-quarters) of the total value of the resort.

The Administration knew they could never convince 75% of the private owners to voluntarily surrender their rights. So, they used a brilliantly ruthless legal loophole:

1. The 1-Hour Delay Loophole 

Under the regulations, if a General Assembly doesn’t have enough attendance to open, it is delayed for one hour. When it restarts, the massive 75% attendance requirement legally vanishes, and they only need 25% of the resort to hold the meeting. By intentionally using this loophole in 2015, the meeting was officially delayed to 10:30 AM due to a “lack of quorum”. When it restarted, the total attendance in the room was only 36.47% of the resort.

2. The Monopoly: The Bank’s Votes in 2015 

Even with the lowered quorum, how did they win the votes? They didn’t win over the private owners, they simply crushed us with a corporate proxy cluster controlled by the banks.

The Bankrupt “Fundo” (Controlled by the Bank): This single entity held 26% of the entire resort’s voting power. The Promoter (Acordo Óbidos): Held roughly another 2.8%.

With these corporate entities in their pocket, the Condominium Administration’s representative walked into the room openly declaring that her personal power of representation alone accounted for 31% of the entire resort.

Now, do the math: only 36.47% of the total resort’s voting power even showed up. Because the Administration held a 31% proxy block, they single-handedly controlled over 85% of the active votes in the room. It was an absolute, mathematically unbeatable monopoly.

Private owners fiercely fought back!

Owners went on the official record outraged that massive corporate funds were hiding behind bankruptcy protection to avoid paying their condo fees, yet were simultaneously using their massive proxy votes to rewrite the rules to punish private owners. But the math was the math. The bank’s votes drowned out the private resistance.

3. Harvesting Our Silence 

But they still mathematically needed a supermajority of the entire resort to actually rewrite the rules. So, they used a second, hidden weapon: The “Silence is Consent” Trap. Under the rulebook, if an absent owner doesn’t formally reply to the mailed assembly minutes within 90 days, their silence legally counts as a “YES” vote.  

The Administration admitted on the official record in 2010 that many of us are foreigners whose mail is frequently returned unclaimed. By weaponizing our returned mail and confusing Portuguese legal documents, they harvested our silence to legally manufacture their supermajority.

The Castle We Live In Today (The Two-Tier Legal System) 

The result of those loopholes and the bank’s voting power is the unbalanced reality we face today. The Administration successfully engineered a two-tier legal system. If the Administration wants to sue you for unpaid quotas/debts, their new rules explicitly allow them to use standard, fast, and cheap public courts. But if you want to sue the Administration, challenge an unfair fine, or annul an illegal assembly vote, the rulebook dictates that you are still legally trapped: you must submit your claim to the extremely expensive private Arbitration Tribunal.

The Gap in Condominium Administration Authority

The Administration is NOT the final judge of your property. They only carved out the public court exception for collecting money. If you build a fence, install a solar panel, or alter your garden, they cannot take you to a cheap public court to force you to tear it down. For architectural disputes, they are still completely bound to the Arbitration Tribunal. If you stand your ground, they have to pay for a highly complex and expensive private lawsuit to stop you.

How do we take the crown back? 

Because the bank’s voting power has weakened significantly since 2015, and at the last AGM the biggest bank stayed neutral and more private owners are joining the assemblies, we now have a clear mathematical path to take our castle back:

The 50% Ultimate Victory 

To successfully roll back the rules and force the Administration to stop using standard public judges entirely, we must build a unified alliance representing over 50% of the resort’s total voting power. We walk straight into a General Assembly and use our absolute majority to vote “yes” on a proposal that strikes their exception from the text, legally locking them back into the private Arbitration Tribunal alongside the rest of the owners.

But here is the ultimate good news: 

We can also use that exact same 50% to fire the condominium management. When the management rewrote the rulebook in 2015, they also lowered the shield protecting their own jobs. The current rules now explicitly state that the Assembly can dismiss the Administrator with a majority – 50% not 75% anymore.

If you think gathering 50% of the resort is a pipe dream, look at the numbers. During the last major recorded General Assembly, over 53% of the resort’s voting power actually participated. Meanwhile, the votes directly related to the investors and the condominium management have shrunk to just about 10%.

Outvoting them is no longer just a theory. Uniting our votes is a highly realistic, near-term goal. By standing together, we don’t just fix the rules – we can legally strip them of their permanent crown, vote them out of the castle, and finally choose who manages our own properties.

Thank you! Ben