House committee reviews the UPR's idle properties; the tax roll lists at least 75 in the university's name, 42 of them in San Juan
The Treasury Committee of Puerto Rico's House of Representatives has opened a review of unused properties owned by the University of Puerto Rico to find assets that could be sold to raise money for the public university system, the San Juan Daily Star reported on September 29, 2026. The review covers structures, housing units and vacant land on every campus; the committee will ask for an updated registry of all UPR properties, the rules governing their sale, and the way sale proceeds reach the university's fund, according to the outlet.
Part of the portfolio comes from a Civil Code rule in force since 1930: property the state inherits when someone dies without heirs or a will passes to the university, except farmland, which goes to the Land Authority. The committee chair said the registry must be modernised to capture those transfers, and that a UPR property sale can take up to 10 months, a timeline that discourages buyers, the outlet reported.
What the tax roll shows
RED Atlas owner records, drawn from the CRIM tax roll, list at least 75 properties (79 property records) whose owner is written as the University of Puerto Rico, with a combined land area of about 1,094 hectares. San Juan holds 42 of them, on 173 hectares. Carolina and Ponce have four each; Mayagüez, Humacao and Juana Díaz three each; Corozal, Sabana Grande, Cayey, Bayamón and Isabela two each.
The largest tracts are outside the metro: 127 hectares across three properties in Juana Díaz, 126 across two in Corozal, 119 across two in Isabela and 78 across three in Mayagüez. The count depends on how the owner's name was written on the roll: it leaves out the 12 properties held by the university's retirement fund and any holding recorded under another spelling, the kind of gap the committee says an updated registry should close.