Cadastre and land registry in Croatia: how to read the extract

Every guide to buying property in Croatia, ours included, says the same sentence at some point: check the paperwork. Then it moves on to the next topic and nobody shows you the paper.

This guide is that paper. It explains what a Croatian land registry extract looks like, what each of its parts says, which of those entries still bind you after you have paid, and what to do when the cadastre and the land registry make two different claims about the same parcel.

That last part is the rule on Pelješac, not the exception. Much of the peninsula still sits in cadastral municipalities whose survey dates from the Austrian one, land registers in places have not been refreshed in decades, and most old houses changed hands through an inheritance nobody carried through. The result is that two official registers tell two different stories about the same house, and both are formally correct.

For a buyer that is not a reason to panic. It is work somebody has to do, and the only question is whether you do it before making an offer or after you have paid for a trip and a deposit. Most of what is described here can be checked for free, from a laptop, before you have told anyone you are interested.

It is written from the buyer side, but it is just as useful to an owner preparing a property for sale who wants to know what the first serious buyer with a lawyer is going to find.

A note before we start: this is a guide, not legal advice. It explains how the documents are read so that you know what to ask and what to require. Decisions on a specific property are made with a lawyer who acts for you.

Two registers that answer different questions

We keep the basics short, because we cover them in more detail elsewhere. If what interests you is how the cadastral use affects whether you may build, that is the subject of the guide to building land. If what interests you is why the registers diverge specifically on old family houses, the answer is in the guide to buying from heirs.

The cadastre

The cadastre is maintained by the State Geodetic Administration and it describes the physical position. Where the parcel is, what shape it has, how it was measured, what stands on it and how it is used. What comes out of it is a possession sheet and a copy of the cadastral plan.

The cadastre answers the question of what is there. It does not answer the question of whose it is.

The land registry

The land registry, which people call the gruntovnica, is kept by the land registry departments of the municipal courts. It describes the legal position: who the owner is, in what share, and what encumbers the property. What comes out of it is the land registry extract.

The land registry answers the question of whose it is and on what terms.

Why there are two at all

The split is not a Croatian invention but an inheritance of the central European system, in which surveying and legal recording are separate jobs, one technical and one judicial. The surveyor measures, the court registers rights. That works as long as the two registers keep informing each other.

The problem arises when that flow of information breaks, and in parts of Dalmatia it has been broken for decades. That is why there are parcels today whose description, area and even number differ depending on which register you ask. Neither made a mistake. They simply describe the position as of different years.

Which one governs when they diverge

On the question of ownership only the land registry governs. A possession sheet from the cadastre is not proof of ownership, and it says so on the document itself. On the question of shape and measurement the cadastre governs, because it is the measured record.

A rule of thumb that covers ninety percent of situations: ask the land registry who owns it and what encumbers it, ask the cadastre where it is and how big it is. When the two disagree, neither answer is complete until they are reconciled.

Why this is more than administration for a buyer

The difference has a direct consequence, and that consequence is called the principle of trust in the land registry. Someone who buys in good faith relying on what the register says is protected by law even if it later turns out that the actual position was different.

The land registry does not protect you because it is accurate. It protects you because you relied on it.

That is why the extract is the only document in the whole process that genuinely covers you, and why it is read carefully rather than skimmed. That protection also has a limit: if the extract carries a note of pending litigation, you can no longer invoke good faith, because you were warned. Which is exactly why that single entry is worth so much, and exactly why it is worth being able to recognise.

Getting the extract yourself, in fifteen minutes

This is the part people skip because they assume it takes a lawyer, or at least a contact at the court. It does not, at least not for the first check, and the first check is the one that saves you an unnecessary trip.

What you need

Two pieces of information: the cadastral municipality and the parcel number. Nothing else. You do not need the owner’s name, and the address does not even help, because old houses in villages often have no registered house number and appear in the paperwork as Donje selo bb.

Ask the seller or the agent for both before viewing. If you do not get them, that is already the first piece of information you have got. A parcel number is not sensitive, it is public, and there is no reason for anyone to withhold it unless what stands next to it is uncomfortable. A serious seller will send it in the same message as the photographs.

Where to look

• The joint information system at oss.uredjenazemlja.hr gives access to the land registry and the cadastre in one place. Access is public and basic browsing needs no registration.
• The State Geodetic Administration geoportal shows the parcel on a map and on aerial imagery, so you see the shape, the position, the neighbours and what is actually built.
• The cadastral data viewer gives the cadastral side: area, type of use and possessor.

The three of them together tell you more than an entire first viewing. You see who is registered, how big the parcel is, what shape it has, whether it borders a public road, and whether a building stands on it that does not exist in the paperwork.

What to look for on the aerial image

This is the step most people skip, and it uncovers problems fastest. Put the parcel boundaries over the aerial photograph and compare them with what actually stands on the ground.

• Whether the building sits inside the parcel boundaries or crosses onto the neighbouring one.
• Whether a road leads to the parcel at all, and whether that road crosses somebody else’s land.
• Whether there are structures on the parcel that the description does not mention, for instance an outbuilding, a pool or a terrace.
• Whether the shape matches what you were told, because a long narrow plot and a regular plot of the same area are used very differently.

None of those findings is a reason to walk away on its own. All of them are a reason to ask.

Unofficial printout and certified extract

What you pull yourself is an unofficial printout. For deciding whether to travel at all it is entirely sufficient. For the procedure, the contract and the bank you need a certified extract, which is ordered for a fee and which in practice a lawyer or notary obtains as part of the job.

A practical rule: pull the unofficial printout yourself and immediately, ask for the certified one when the purchase becomes serious. Both are valid as of the day of issue, on which more in the section on pending-application marks.

How to read the extract, sheet by sheet

The extract does not relate to a parcel but to a land registry body. That may be one parcel, but it may also be five of them registered together, as one legal whole with one owner and one set of encumbrances.

That distinction is the first trap. If only part of the body is being sold, for instance the house without the olive grove behind it, that cannot simply be separated with a signature. The body has to be divided, and that is a procedure with its own timeline. The first question with any extract is not who the owner is but which parcels this document covers and whether you are buying all of them.

The extract has three parts and each answers a different question. People generally look only at the second, and the one that surprises them later is the third.

Sheet A, the property sheet

A list of the parcels making up the body, with number, area and description. The description is cadastral: arable land, vineyard, olive grove, pasture, forest, yard, house and building, path.

Sheet A also records rights that run with the property, meaning easements in its favour. If the route to the house crosses a neighbour’s parcel, the place where that is written is exactly here, and it is one of the few parts of an extract where an extra entry is good news.

Four things to look at carefully here:

• Whether the parcel number matches the listing. It sounds trivial and it is the most common error, especially where a body is made up of several parcels and only part is being sold.
• An asterisk before the number. A marking such as *115 means a building parcel from the old survey, as distinct from an ordinary land parcel. On Pelješac old houses are routinely registered exactly that way, so the same cadastral municipality can contain both *115 and 115 as two completely different parcels, sometimes at opposite ends of the village.
• The description against reality. If the description says pasture and a two-storey house stands on the ground, the building was never recorded. Not an obstacle, but work, and we come to it below.
• A registered easement in favour of the body. If access runs across somebody else’s land and there is not a word about it here, the access does not legally exist, however long people have been driving to the house.

Sheet B, the ownership sheet

Who the owner is and in what share. Look for three things here.

First, whether ownership is 1/1 or there are co-ownership shares. Fractions like 1/12 or 5/48 mean that selling the whole needs everyone, not a majority. A single co-owner can sell only their own share, which is almost never what a buyer wants.

Second, who that person is and whether they are likely alive. A year of birth next to the name, markers such as "pok." or "ud.", and an address from the emigration years all say that the entry is old and that an estate will have to be settled before any sale. The name of a person born in 1911 in the ownership sheet is not a formality but an entire procedure.

Third, entries that restrict the person themselves, for instance minority or bankruptcy. Such an owner does not deal freely but through consent or a representative, which changes both the timeline and the procedure.

Sheet C, the encumbrance sheet

Everything that burdens the property is written here. This is the part that decides whether you are buying a house or a house with somebody else’s right inside it, and it deserves a chapter of its own.

What an individual entry looks like

Every entry in the extract has a serial number, a date and the document on which it was made. That sounds like bureaucratic detail and is actually a tool: from the date and the document you see when something arose and why, so you can ask whether it is still current.

A mortgage registered in 2009 for an amount largely repaid since is not the same thing as a mortgage from last year. An easement registered when the village got mains water is something other than an easement registered in the course of a family dispute. The serial number and the date are what tell one from the other.

What the encumbrance sheet actually says

The encumbrance sheet is not read as a list but as the answer to one question: which of these stays on the property after I buy it.

Mortgage

A charge, usually a bank’s. It does not prevent a sale and is very common, but it has to be deleted, and the deletion is paid out of the purchase price. The standard mechanism is that the bank issues a deletion consent against payment of the outstanding debt, so part of the price goes directly to the bank and the remainder to the seller.

A mortgage is therefore a technical item, but only if the contract handles it. If the full price is paid to the seller in the hope that he will settle the bank, the mortgage stays on the property and you have bought somebody else’s debt. Ask the bank for the outstanding figure in writing, not the seller, because the registered amount of a mortgage and the actual remaining debt almost always differ.

Easement

Somebody else’s right to use your property, most often a right of way or passage, but also of pipes, drainage or access for maintenance. An easement attaches to the property, not to the person, and a sale does not extinguish it. The new owner inherits it exactly as they inherit the walls.

It is not necessarily bad news, and here the direction matters. An easement in the encumbrance sheet is a burden on your property. An easement in sheet A is a right in favour of your property, which is exactly what you want to see when the route to the house crosses somebody else’s land.

For old village houses on Pelješac that is often the only legal basis for access, and its absence is one of the few findings on which we advise walking away, because without registered access there is neither reconstruction nor quiet use.

Right of residence and maintenance agreements

A personal easement in favour of one named person, typically a parent who transferred the property to a child under a lifetime or until-death maintenance agreement. That person has the right to live in the property until death, and that right survives a sale.

You would be buying a house in which somebody else lawfully lives. It is resolved by that person’s deletion consent, meaning their agreement, and without it there is no clean purchase. Check whether one exists and who holds it, because it is invisible at a viewing if the person is not there at the time, and in summer they often are not.

Note of pending litigation

An entry recording that proceedings are running over the property. The most important item in the whole encumbrance sheet, because it restricts not only the property but you: from the moment it is entered you can no longer invoke good faith, so the principle of trust in the land registry does not protect you.

The outcome of the litigation binds you as a later acquirer. If you see this entry, it is not an item to negotiate the price over but a reason to withdraw until it is resolved, however convincing the explanation that it is a formality.

Note of enforcement

The property is the subject of enforcement proceedings. A sale outside the enforcement is as a rule not possible without the creditor’s consent, and a settlement is a job for a lawyer, not for a buyer. It is worth knowing that the enforcement sometimes concerns a debt unrelated to the property, but that changes nothing in practice.

Prohibition on disposal and encumbrance

A registered prohibition on dealing, often in favour of a family member or a bank. While it stands, a sale is not valid without the consent of the person in whose favour it is registered. Rare, but where it exists it blocks the deal completely until it is resolved.

Fiduciary ownership

A security arrangement in which ownership has been transferred to the creditor until the debt is settled. The ownership sheet then shows not the person everyone considers the owner but the creditor. Rare, but very confusing when it appears, and always requiring a lawyer.

Which of these survives the purchase

This is the takeaway that makes the whole chapter worth reading:

• Deleted against payment: a mortgage, as a rule, through a bank deletion consent obtained before payment.
• Stays forever: an easement registered in favour of another property, because it attaches to the land rather than the owner.
• Stays until the holder consents: right of residence, maintenance agreements, prohibition on disposal.
• Do not buy while it runs: a note of pending litigation and a note of enforcement.

Sellers rarely lie about this. More often they simply do not know, because the entry is thirty years old and nobody in the family ever had to read it.

The pending-application mark, the only entry about the future

Everything else in the extract describes the position as of the day of issue. This mark is the exception, and that is why it deserves its own chapter.

It records that an application has been filed which the court has not yet decided. The key point is that an entry takes effect from the moment the application arrives, not from the decision. That means what lies behind the mark may be a mortgage, a sale to somebody else, an enforcement or a change of owner which, once decided, will rank ahead of anything you file later.

How to find out what lies behind it

The mark itself does not disclose content, only that something exists. The content is established by inspecting the file at the land registry department, using the case number shown alongside. A lawyer can request that, and often so can the seller, since most often he is the applicant.

If a seller does not know what is pending on his own property, that is information in itself. It means somebody else is taking a step, and it is worth finding out who.

Three practical consequences

• An extract with an active mark is not a complete picture and must not be treated as though it were.
• The mark has to be checked again on the day of signing, rather than relying on an extract three weeks old.
• The same principle works in your favour, so your application for registration is filed immediately after signatures are certified, so that your priority begins to run as early as possible.

A delay of a few days in filing is not an administrative trifle here but a risk, because in that window somebody else can file their application and rank ahead of you.

Registration, provisional entry, notation

Three words that get constantly confused, and they differ in how much they actually give you.

Registration

A final and unconditional entry of a right. This is what you want and the goal of the whole procedure. Registering ownership requires a document with a registration clause, meaning the seller’s express consent for the buyer to be entered as owner.

That clause is the reason the balance of the price is paid only against it. Without it you have a contract but no document on which to register, so you depend on the seller’s goodwill to provide it afterwards.

Provisional entry

A conditional entry, made where the document is missing something. It gives you your place in the queue, but becomes final only if it is justified within a deadline, meaning that what was missing is supplied later. If it is not justified, it is deleted and your place disappears.

A provisional entry is useful as temporary protection, but it is not the same as ownership. If somebody tells you that you are registered, ask whether that is a registration or a provisional entry, because the difference is between a finished thing and a thing with a deadline.

Notation

The entry of a fact rather than a right. It transfers nothing, but produces effects against third parties, most often by destroying their good faith. The note of pending litigation is the most important, but there is also a note of priority ranking, which reserves a place in the queue for a future registration.

A priority ranking note is useful precisely in complex purchases, for instance where a mortgage deletion or the completion of an estate is being waited on, because it holds your place until the conditions are met. It is not a standard part of every purchase, but it is a tool worth raising with your lawyer when there is waiting involved.

An example: what one extract looks like

The following example is assembled from several real cases and does not describe any particular property. It is deliberately typical rather than dramatic.

You are offered a stone house in a village, two floors, with a small yard. The listing says house 120 square metres, grounds 100 square metres, ownership in order. You ask for the cadastral municipality and the parcel number, and you get them.

Sheet A shows that the land registry body is made up of two parcels: *115, described as house and yard, 61 square metres, and 118/1, described as yard, 41 square metres. First conclusion: the grounds are not 100 square metres separate from the house, the two parcels total 102 square metres and the house stands on most of that. Second conclusion: the body is two parcels, so one cannot be sold without dividing it.

Sheet A contains no registered right of way. The house is in a terrace and is reached down a narrow passage between neighbouring houses. That is question number one: whose parcel does that passage cross and is anything registered.

Sheet B shows one owner, 1/1, with year of birth 1931 and an address in another town. That person would today be over ninety. It does not mean they have died, but it means this has to be checked before any offer, because if they have, an entire inheritance procedure is required.

Sheet C has two entries. The first is a mortgage from 2011 in favour of a bank, for an amount probably largely repaid. A technical item, resolvable through a deletion consent out of the purchase price, but it needs a written figure for the actual outstanding debt. The second is a right of residence in favour of a person born in 1955. That person has the right to live in the house for life, whoever buys it.

At the foot of the extract there is an active pending-application mark, with no indication of content.

Now compare that with what the listing said. The house does exist and ownership is indeed 1/1, so the listing did not lie. But a buyer who read only sheet B would think they were buying a vacant house from a tidy owner. In fact they are buying a house with another person’s registered right of residence, a mortgage to be deleted, an owner who may have died, no registered access and an unknown application in progress.

None of those items necessarily means walking away. A right of residence is deleted if the holder consents, a mortgage is deleted out of the price, an estate gets settled, an easement can be registered later by agreement with the neighbour. But each of them has a timeline, a cost and a holder, and all of it has to be resolved before payment rather than after.

How that case would be resolved

The order is not arbitrary, because one thing depends on another. First you establish whether the owner is alive, because who can sign at all depends on it. If they are, they sign themselves and everything is faster. If not, an estate comes before everything else, and that is a timeline measured in months or years.

In parallel you ask what lies behind the pending mark, because until that is answered you do not know whether somebody with a better ranking exists. Then you obtain the bank’s written figure for the outstanding debt and the conditions for a deletion consent, and build the mortgage into the payment structure.

The right of residence is resolved by talking to its holder. It cannot be sidestepped, so if that person will not agree to deletion, the house in practice does not sell as vacant, and that has to be reflected in the price or the deal ends.

Access is resolved by agreement with the neighbour whose parcel the passage crosses, and the agreement is registered as an easement. This is the one item that can also be resolved after the purchase, but it is negotiated incomparably more easily while the seller still has an interest in the deal going through.

Only once all of that is lined up do you know what you are actually buying and at what price. Everything before that is guesswork.

That is the whole point of reading an extract. You are not looking for a reason to walk away but for a list of what somebody has to do and an agreement on who pays for it.

When the cadastre and the land registry disagree

Disagreement is a routine occurrence on Pelješac and comes in a handful of recognisable forms, some of them trivial and some not.

A difference in area

The most common form. The land registry says one figure, the cadastre another, and a new survey gives a third. The reason is usually that the land registry figure comes from the old survey and was never reconciled with the newer measurement.

What you buy is a parcel identified by number, not a given number of square metres, so a difference does not by itself break the deal. But the contract, the tax return and the price per square metre are all written from one figure, so which one is real has to be settled before signing. With land, a difference of a few percent also changes what may be built on the parcel, which we cover in the guide to usable and gross floor area.

A difference in the parcel number or shape

More serious. It arises where a subdivision or new survey was carried out in the cadastre and the land registry never followed, so the old parcel in the register no longer corresponds to any parcel on the ground.

Until that is reconciled, what is actually being sold is not reliably known, and a contract describing a parcel that no longer exists in one register creates a problem at registration. Reconciliation runs through a surveyor and a notification to the land registry, and it is work done before the sale.

A building that exists but is not registered

The land is registered, the house on it is not. Very common with old houses, because recording the building was never needed by anyone until somebody wanted to sell or borrow against it.

The procedure runs like this: an authorised geodetic engineer produces a report for recording the building, the cadastre records it, and notifies the land registry department, which registers the building. Alongside that you need the documents proving the building is legal: an occupancy permit, a certificate for structures older than 15 February 1968, or a decision on the as built condition for anything legalised. What that means for a renovation and a budget is in the guide to stone houses for renovation.

The order is mandatory and cannot be skipped: the cadastre first, the land registry only after. What matters is only when it gets resolved. Before payment you have leverage, afterwards you have none.

An unregistered owner

Somebody acquired ownership validly, through inheritance, adverse possession, a court decision or by operation of law, but never registered. They are the owner, but the register does not say so, so they can neither sell nor mortgage until they are registered.

This is the most common cause of disagreement on the peninsula and almost always leads back to an unsettled estate, which we cover in detail in the guide to buying from heirs. When you hear the sentence that the house is theirs but has not been transferred, this is exactly what you are being told.

The individual correction procedure

Where the land registry position is inaccurate or out of date, there is a procedure by which it is corrected for a specific parcel and brought into line with reality. It is run by the land registry department and started by an application with evidence of the actual position.

For you as a buyer three things matter: that it exists, that it takes time, and that as a rule the seller starts and pays for it before the sale. If the buyer is asked to resolve it after the purchase, the price has to reflect that and the risk has to be described in the contract rather than passed over in silence.

Flats in the register of deposited contracts

In older buildings a flat may be registered in the register of deposited contracts instead of the ordinary land registry, because the building was never divided into units. That is not invalid, but it is incomplete and often insufficient for a bank, so a purchase with a mortgage usually requires the division to be carried out first. What exactly you buy with a flat is covered in the guide to apartment ownership.

How long reconciliation takes and who pays

Here too time is the larger cost, which regularly surprises people.

Time

• Correcting an obvious error in an entry: short, weeks.
• Recording a building where all the papers already exist: months, mostly because of the survey report and the mandatory order of cadastre then land registry.
• Registering an unregistered owner where the estate is already settled: months.
• Registering where the estate is not settled: count in years, because the estate has to be settled first.
• The individual correction procedure: depends on the case and on whether there are objections.
• Dividing a land registry body where only part is being sold: months, with a survey report.

We give these as orders of magnitude, not as promises. The realistic estimate for a specific case comes from the lawyer or surveyor handling it, and it is a question asked at the beginning rather than at the end.

Who pays

It is a matter of negotiation, but there is a rule worth defending: putting the paperwork in order is the seller’s job, because he is selling something that has to be capable of being transferred. Where the buyer takes that on, it has to be visible in the price and governed by the contract, with a deadline and a consequence if the deadline is missed.

Avoid in particular the arrangement in which the buyer funds the reconciliation before acquiring anything. You would then be paying for a procedure over a property you have no right to, while the seller can sell to somebody else in the meantime.

Your own cost of registration after the purchase is small and predictable, and is described together with the other costs in the guide to the costs of buying.

When a discrepancy is trivial and when it is a reason to walk away

Not every discrepancy is equal. This is the division we use ourselves when deciding whether to take a property into the portfolio at all.

Trivia resolved along the way

• A difference in area of a few percent where the parcel number and boundaries are undisputed.
• An outdated description in sheet A, for instance pasture instead of yard.
• A bank mortgage deleted out of the purchase price.
• A building that is not recorded but has all the documents proving it is legal.
• A misspelled name or an old address for the owner.

Serious, but resolvable before signing

• An unregistered owner whose estate has been settled, so only registration is needed.
• A mismatch in the parcel number after a subdivision the register never followed.
• An active pending mark whose content has been checked and is harmless.
• A right of residence whose holder is known, reachable and willing to have it deleted.
• A land registry body that needs dividing because only part is being sold.
• Access that exists in fact, where the neighbour is willing to sign an easement.

A reason to withdraw

• A note of pending litigation or a note of enforcement.
• An unregistered owner with no estate settled and no procedure started.
• A prohibition on disposal whose holder will not consent or cannot be found.
• A right of residence whose holder will not agree to deletion.
• No access either in fact or in law, and a neighbour who will not agree.
• A seller who offers only a possession sheet and avoids discussing the land registry.
• A demand for payment or a large deposit before any of the above is resolved.

That last item is the only genuinely reliable signal on the whole list. Tidy people with untidy paperwork have no problem with the paperwork being sorted first. The only people who have a problem with it are those who benefit from your not looking.

Seven things that most often surprise foreign buyers

These are the findings we regularly have to explain to buyers from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Poland, because they differ from what they are used to at home.

1. The owner in the register may have been dead for fifty years. An entry does not change by itself and there is no deadline within which an inheritance must be settled, so a name from the 1930s is not an error but work nobody did.
2. The cadastral description says nothing about whether you may build. A vineyard can be building land and a yard can be outside the building zone. Permitted use comes from the spatial plan, not the cadastre.
3. A house can exist physically and not legally. A building not recorded in the cadastre does not exist in the land registry either, however long somebody has lived in it.
4. Access is not a given. The fact that people have driven to the house for decades does not mean a right of way is registered. Without an entry in sheet A, access does not legally exist.
5. Areas differ and that is normal. Three different figures for the same parcel, from the land registry, the cadastre and a new survey, are an ordinary occurrence in old cadastral municipalities.
6. A right of residence survives a sale. A person entered in the encumbrance sheet has the right to live in the house you bought, and it is deleted only with their consent.
7. An extract is valid as of the day of issue. There is no certificate valid for a month. Because of how priority ranking works, the position is checked again on the day of signing.

None of these findings is a reason to give up on buying in Croatia. All of them are a reason to look at the paperwork before rather than after, and to have the work done by somebody who can read it.

What if you have already bought and are only now reading the papers

We get this question more often than you would expect, and from people who bought the house five or fifteen years ago. The answer is generally encouraging: most of it can be sorted out, only more slowly and at greater cost than it would have been before payment.

First check whether you are registered at all

A great many people are convinced they are the owner because they hold a signed contract and the keys. A contract creates an obligation; ownership is created by registration. Pull the extract and see whether your name stands in sheet B. If it does, you are done.

If it does not, but an application was filed

Check whether there is a pending mark with your case. If there is, the registration is in progress and your priority runs from the day it was received, so you are protected while the decision is awaited.

If no application was ever filed

The most common scenario. The contract exists, signatures were certified, but nobody took it to the land registry department. If the contract contains a registration clause, the application can be filed today, and that is largely a formality.

If there is no registration clause, it has to be obtained from the seller. That is where the problem arises when the seller has since died, emigrated or simply does not reply, because you then go to court with a claim for a declaration and registration. That is slow, but it is not lost.

If the building is still unrecorded

As the owner of the land you can now start that yourself, through a surveyor, and you need nobody’s consent. The cost is yours, but the procedure is orderly and predictable.

What all of these situations have in common is that time works against you only until you begin. Once the application is filed, the place in the queue is taken.

How we handle it

When somebody tells us they would like to sell a property, the first thing we do is not photography but a check of the paperwork, and we do it before we even agree a price.

We obtain the land registry extract and the cadastral record for every parcel and compare them line by line: parcel numbers, areas, description, owners and shares, then the whole encumbrance sheet. Then we open the aerial imagery and compare it with the paper, because that shows in a minute what the text does not: that a building stands on the parcel which the register does not have, that the access road crosses the neighbour’s parcel, or that a terrace was built over the boundary.

We do that for an entirely practical reason. A price without that information is not a price but a wish. A property with untidy paperwork does not sell faster because nobody mentions it, it simply falls through later and more expensively, usually in the middle of negotiations, when every finding becomes a reason to cut the price.

For an owner the advice that follows is the one we give everybody: start the reconciliation before coming to market. A buyer with a lawyer will find exactly what we found, only at the moment when you are no longer negotiating from strength.

For a buyer a simple rule follows. The state of the paperwork is written in the listing, including what is not yet resolved. If something is not clean, you will hear it from us before you book a trip rather than after you have paid for one, including when the honest answer is that you should not buy that property.

If you are selling: how to prepare the paperwork

This guide is written for buyers, but an owner gets a direct benefit from it, because a buyer will discover all of the above anyway. The only question is whether they discover it before the offer or in the middle of negotiations.

The order we recommend is this:

1. Pull your own land registry extract and possession sheet and compare them. If they differ, you know you have work to do.
2. Check whether ownership is registered to you rather than to a parent or grandparent. If it is not, start the estate immediately, because that is the longest timeline in the whole process.
3. Read the encumbrance sheet and establish whether something remains that you considered long resolved, typically an old mortgage that was never deleted.
4. Check whether the building is recorded and whether you hold the documents proving it is legal.
5. Check the access and whether an easement is registered.
6. Only then set a price.

The reason for that order is simple. Tidy paperwork does not only raise the price, it shortens the time to sell and removes the buyer’s negotiating leverage. Untidy paperwork discovered during negotiations turns into a discount, and almost always a larger one than the cost of putting it right.

How the state of the paperwork affects the valuation itself is covered in the guide to what your property is worth.

A glossary of the terms on the extract

The terms you will meet, explained in one sentence each.

• Land registry body is a set of parcels registered together as one legal whole.
• Sheet A, the property sheet describes the parcels and the rights that run with them.
• Sheet B, the ownership sheet lists the owners and their shares.
• Sheet C, the encumbrance sheet lists the burdens and restrictions.
• Plomba, the pending-application mark, records that an application has been filed and not yet decided.
• Priority ranking is the order counted from the moment an application is received, not from the decision.
• Uknjižba is a final entry of a right, predbilježba a conditional one, and zabilježba the entry of a fact.
• Tabularna izjava, the registration clause, is the seller’s express consent for the buyer to be entered as owner.
• Brisovno očitovanje, the deletion consent, is the consent of the holder of a burden to have it deleted.
• Idealni dio is a co-ownership share expressed as a fraction, not a physical part of the property.
• Služnost, an easement, is a right to use somebody else’s property, attached either to a property or to a person.
• Posjedovni list, the possession sheet, is the cadastral document on possession, which is not proof of ownership.
• Prijavni list is the document by which the cadastre notifies the land registry of a change.
• Geodetski elaborat is the report of an authorised surveyor, the basis of every change in the cadastre.
• Izvanknjižni vlasnik is somebody who acquired ownership validly but is not registered.

A checklist before making an offer

Ask for the answers in writing, and from the lawyer running your purchase, not from the seller and not from us.

• The land registry extract for every parcel, no more than a few days old.
• A list of every parcel making up the land registry body and confirmation that you are buying all of them.
• A check of all three sheets, with particular attention to the encumbrance sheet.
• A list of every active pending mark and what lies behind each of them.
• The possession sheet and a copy of the cadastral plan, for comparison with the extract.
• An explanation in writing of every difference between the cadastre and the land registry.
• Whether the building is recorded and, if not, who is recording it and by when.
• The documents proving the building is legal: occupancy permit, certificate for structures before 15 February 1968, or a decision on the as built condition.
• Access, and where the route crosses somebody else’s parcel, a registered easement in sheet A.
• Deletion consents for every burden that has to be removed, obtained before payment.
• A re-check of the pending marks on the day of signing.

That last item is the one almost everybody skips. An extract three weeks old describes the position three weeks ago, and an entry takes effect from the moment the application is received, so anything could have happened in between.

The next step

If you have a specific property in mind, send us the cadastral municipality and the parcel number. We will look at what both registers say about it and tell you whether it is a case that resolves, including when the answer is that you should not buy it.

If you are selling and suspect your paperwork is not reconciled, get in touch before you come to market. Sorted paperwork raises the price and shortens negotiations; paperwork discovered mid-negotiation does the opposite.

And if you would like to see what is currently available, look at the properties.