Real estate investment in Italy and the risk of urban and construction regularity • Carlo Pagliai ingegnere urbanista

Carlo Pagliai
06/03/2016
Articoli

The italian property sector, and most of its operators, often tends to neglect the importance of respect about the property built and the municipal permits.

In Italy there is a high amount of municipal, national laws, regulations urban planning and landscape constraints that make it very difficult, even impossible, to make the simplest building transformation.

The phenomenon of illegal housing must not be ignored especially if you want to buy properties in Italy.

I want to give you an example: usually in Italy, when a potential buyer decides to purchase the property, he proceeds to enter into a preliminary contract with the seller to determine the final conditions and the official sale date.

Often by the time of stipulating of this preliminary contract to the final sale date, he must spend several months during which the seller can make some research (not obligatory) on municipal building practices and cadastral property.

The practice of checking the building regularity of the property before the final sale is very common only in Tuscany, while the remaining Italian territory is a fairly uncommon practice.

In Tuscany, the applied practice requires that the seller can instruct a professional architect, engineer or surveyor to check correspondence of the building in respect of all municipal practices related to it.

Often the buildings are not realized fully respecting their projects, and so it is not uncommon to find that some parts of buildings are illegal or have a few important discrepancies.

In Italy there are some laws entailing heavy penalties and punishments for the owners of properties with unauthorized building and for those who make them.

In some cases, in addition to having to remove unauthorized buildings without being able to regularize them, there is the risk of invalidity of real estate trading contracts.

I would suggest to foreign investors wishing to buy property in Italy to verify the regularity of the property construction, or to appoint qualified professionals, in order not to make a bad investment.

There is a real estate network that verify the regularity of the property construction before every preliminary contract, it’s called Compravendita Conforme^®.

See you sooner on this blog.