Brazilian law protects family assets, understood as the residential property owned by the couple or family entity, ensuring that they are not subject to seizure and preventing them from being used to settle any type of debt.
However, what some people don’t know is that this guarantee is not absolute and can be mitigated depending on the specific case.
In this sense, the 27th Private Law Chamber of the Court of Justice of the State of São Paulo recently ruled, in a unanimous decision, that it upheld the seizure of property belonging to elderly people who acted as guarantors in a residential lease agreement.
According to the Court’s understanding, the non-attachability of the family property is unenforceable in the case of an obligation arising from a guarantee granted in a lease agreement, as provided for in Summary 549 and art. 3, VII of Law 8,009/90.
