If you want to see the 3/5 community vote rule do real work in Mijas, you have to look at a specific stretch of coastline. Not the white-painted streets of Mijas Pueblo, where short-let supply is constrained more by housing stock than by neighbours. Not the golf belt around La Cala, where many properties sit inside resort communities whose statutes already handled this question years before the vote rule existed. The stretch where the rule actually bites is the coastal urbanisation belt: Sitio de Calahonda at one end, Riviera del Sol in the middle, and the smaller pool complexes that fill the gaps between them.
This is where the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal reform meets its most natural test case. Hundreds of mid-density complexes built between the late 1970s and the early 2010s, mostly two- to four-storey blocks arranged around shared pools, gardens and parking. Year-round Northern European residents sharing communal staircases with two-night Booking guests. Owner-occupiers who chose the coast to retire, and absentee owners who chose it to let. When the law changed and gave existing communities a route to vote new VUT activity out, this is the postcode where the agendas filled up first.
What makes Sitio de Calahonda its own animal
Sitio de Calahonda is unusual even by Costa del Sol standards. It is one of the largest privately-administered urbanisations in Andalucía, with its own entidad de conservación, its own internal road network, and a resident population that runs into the tens of thousands once you count permanent and semi-permanent foreign owners. Inside that perimeter sit dozens of sub-communities, each with its own administrator, its own junta, and its own internal politics. The 3/5 vote does not happen at the level of Sitio de Calahonda as a whole. It happens block by block, sub-community by sub-community.
That fragmentation matters. On the same street in Calahonda you can find one complex where a vote has already passed restricting any new VUT activity, and one fifty metres further along where the question has not yet been raised because two-thirds of the owners are British and only attend juntas by proxy. We see this when we onboard properties: two apartments that look identical on paper, in the same postcode, can sit on completely different sides of the line depending on how their comunidad voted in 2024 or 2025. Before we will take a property on, our office in Arroyo de la Miel pulls the minutes of the last three juntas. In Calahonda specifically, that document is doing more decision-making than any nightly rate spreadsheet.
Why Riviera del Sol plays out differently
Riviera del Sol sits a few kilometres west and reads from the same architectural script — low-rise blocks, shared pools, Mediterranean planting, the A-7 humming somewhere above the roofline. But the community-vote dynamic plays out with a different temperature. Riviera was built later on average, attracted a higher share of investment buyers from Northern Europe in its first decade, and as a result has a higher concentration of absentee landlords versus permanent residents.
In theory that should make Riviera more favourable to short-let activity, because absentee owners benefit from rental flexibility and tend to vote to preserve it. In practice it cuts both ways. The same absentee owners who let their apartments six months of the year are also the ones complaining when the apartment next door is run as a weekend stag rental. The Riviera juntas we have seen in the last eighteen months tend not to vote VUT activity out wholesale. They vote in conditions: minimum stay lengths, registered key-handover times, named cleaning windows, a hard rule against using the communal pool after 22:00. The 3/5 rule gives them the leverage to write those conditions into the building bylaws, where before they were polite requests in a Telegram group.
If you own in Riviera del Sol and you are managing your own rental, the question is no longer "can I let it" but "what does the latest acta say about how I let it." That is a quieter regulatory shift than an outright ban, but it changes the operational picture significantly. Our property management workflow for Riviera apartments now includes a quarterly acta review as a standing item.
How the pool complex changes the conversation
The pool is the lever. Anyone who has sat in a Mijas Costa junta knows the argument always comes back to the same shared space. Long-term residents who use the pool as their daily afternoon constant do not want it crowded with rotating short-stay guests. Short-let owners point out that their guests pay the same comunidad fees as anyone else and have the same legal right to use the facilities. The 3/5 vote does not resolve this — but it changes who has to compromise.
Before the reform, a comunidad could grumble about pool overcrowding for years and get nowhere. The statutes protected each owner's individual right to let. Now, with a 3/5 majority, a community can write specific restrictions into the título constitutivo itself. We have seen Calahonda complexes where the new rule limits VUT occupancy of the pool deck to defined hours, requires guests to register at a concierge desk, or sets a maximum number of VUT-registered units in any single block. None of those measures shuts down the rental — but they make a manager's job materially harder if the operational base is not set up for it.
This is also where the difference between coastal Mijas and the other two Mijas markets becomes obvious. Mijas Pueblo at 428 metres has almost no shared-pool complexes — its rental stock is small village houses and the occasional boutique conversion. The community-vote conversation there barely registers, because the buildings are not configured for the conflict. The golf belt is the opposite extreme: most golf-resort communities had short-let statutes baked in from delivery, and many of them either positively welcome rental activity (because it fills the bars and pro shops in shoulder season) or had restrictive bylaws in place long before 2025. The coastal urbanisation belt — Calahonda, Riviera, the smaller pockets between them — is the only one of the three Mijas markets where the rule is genuinely up for grabs every junta.
Reading a community before you buy
If you are looking at a property in this belt and the listing photographs include a turquoise pool surrounded by sunloungers, the next document you need is the comunidad's acta history. Not the brochure. Not the energy certificate. The minutes.
Three things to look for. First, has the 3/5 question been raised yet? If the answer is no, you are buying into a community that may vote in the next twelve to thirty-six months and you have no way of predicting which side it lands on. Second, if it has been raised and passed in favour of restrictions, what exactly do those restrictions say? "No new VUT activity" reads very differently from "VUT activity continues subject to a registered cleaning window." Third, what is the resident-to-absentee ratio, and how does the junta usually vote? A complex where 70% of owners are permanent residents will trend toward restriction. A complex where 70% are absentee investors will trend toward permissive conditions.
We do this acta read for owners before we sign a management agreement. It saves an enormous amount of trouble later. A property whose comunidad voted three months ago to ban new VUT registrations does not just have a regulatory problem — it has a resale problem, because the next buyer will run the same check. Reading the VUT licence picture without reading the community alongside it gives a false sense of what is actually possible.
The owners who get caught out
The owners we see caught out in this belt fall into a few predictable categories. The first is the recent buyer who completed in 2023 or 2024 and assumed the comunidad would remain neutral, because that is what their solicitor told them at signing. The reform has moved faster than legal advice in many cases, and a community that was indifferent in 2023 may have voted in 2025.
The second is the long-time owner who has been letting informally — friends-of-friends, off-platform, no VUT registration — for fifteen years, and now finds that their neighbours have noticed and used the new rule to formalise their objections. Informal letting was always vulnerable. The community vote has made it materially more so, because once a building has voted, the burden shifts onto the letting owner to prove compliance.
The third is the owner who bought specifically as an income property, registered their VUT, set up cleanly, and then discovered six months later that a 3/5 vote had grandfathered them in but blocked any future flexibility. Grandfathering protects what exists today. It does not protect a refurbishment that triggers a re-registration, or a change of ownership that may require fresh community sign-off depending on how the statutes were drafted.
For owners in any of those positions, the route forward is the same: get the paperwork clean, get the operational standard high enough that no neighbour has a complaint to raise at the next junta, and use realistic income modelling for the constrained future rather than the unconstrained past.
What we change operationally when a comunidad tightens
When a Calahonda or Riviera complex votes in new conditions, our handover routine changes. Check-in times move to align with the new rules. Cleaning crews are rebooked to the windows the comunidad has agreed. Guest welcome packs gain a one-page summary of the building's specific rules — pool hours, lift etiquette, parking, no late-night terrace use — written in the languages we actually see in the booking mix, which on this stretch of coast means English, Dutch, German, French and a steady share of Swedish.
We also brief owners differently. An owner whose comunidad has tightened cannot run a property the way they ran it in 2022. The pricing model shifts toward fewer, longer, better-vetted bookings. Two-night Friday-Saturday lets become harder to justify operationally and harder to defend at the next junta if a neighbour complains. A four-night minimum in shoulder season and a week minimum in peak does more to keep the building calm than any amount of guest-experience polish, and on the right property it does not cost much income.
Estimating that revised income picture honestly is part of the work. We will model both scenarios — current rules and the worst-case junta outcome — when an owner asks us to look at a property. The estimator gives the headline number, but the comunidad picture sets the realistic ceiling.
Where this leaves the Mijas Costa belt as a whole
The headline question — is Calahonda and Riviera del Sol still a viable short-let market — has the same answer it had eighteen months ago. Yes, with the right property, in the right complex, run to the right standard. The 3/5 rule has not killed the market. It has sharpened it. Complexes that are well-administered, with a resident base that accepts considered short-let activity, will continue to host VUTs. Complexes that voted to restrict will quietly become long-let or owner-occupier buildings, which is what their residents wanted.
What has changed is the cost of getting the read wrong. Buying in this belt without reading the comunidad first is now an expensive mistake — possibly not on day one, but on the day you try to register a new VUT, refurbish, sell, or just defend yourself at a junta after a noise complaint. The buildings look identical from the road. The legal positions inside them are diverging fast.
For owners already in the belt, the work is to stay on the right side of whichever line the comunidad has drawn. For buyers, the work is to read the documents before you sign anything. For everyone, the work is to accept that Mijas Costa is no longer a market where you can hold a coastal apartment, list it on a platform, and let the comunidad sort itself out. The comunidad has sorted itself out, and the answer it has reached is different in every building.
If you own in Calahonda, Riviera del Sol, or any of the smaller pool-complex urbanisations along the Mijas Costa coast and you want a clean read on where your community sits — and what that means for the rental year ahead — we will look at the actas and walk through the picture with you. Speak to our team via /for-owners/#contact and we will set up a call from the Arroyo de la Miel office.
