A title extract is usually read for one line — who owns it. The Zakon o državnom premjeru i katastru nepokretnosti treats that line as the smallest part of the document. Around it sits a category of entry called zabilježba, an annotation, and its catalogue is long enough that most of what a buyer actually needs to know about a property is capable of appearing there.
That cuts two ways. If you are buying, the annotations are where the problems are visible. If you are litigating, they are how you make your position visible to everyone who comes after you.
🔴 A currency warning before the substance, because it is a large one. The consolidated text we were able to obtain covers gazette references up to 017/18 of 20 March 2018. The surveying and cadastre legislation was amended at the end of 2025, and the responsible authority has since been renamed. What follows describes the structure of the annotation regime as that consolidation sets it out; article numbers and any deadline should be confirmed against the current gazette text before they are relied on. We would rather publish the architecture with the caveat than publish nothing, and we would rather flag the gap than imply a currency we cannot evidence.
What an annotation is for
Under Article 98 of that consolidation, an annotation records facts — either facts about the owner (minority, guardianship, deprivation of legal capacity) or facts about the property.
The property-side list is the interesting one, and it is far broader than most buyers expect. As the consolidation sets it out, it includes:
| Category | Examples the Act names |
|---|---|
| Disputes | Commencement of a dispute to establish rights over the property, or to delete an executed entry; annotation of a claim for deletion of an entry; commenced adverse possession proceedings; an extraordinary legal remedy |
| Insolvency and enforcement | Bankruptcy and the commencement of bankruptcy; commencement of enforcement on the property in the cases prescribed by the enforcement legislation |
| Restrictions | Existence of a prohibition on alienation and encumbrance; expropriation proceedings |
| Construction status | Building started without a building permit; building built without a building permit; building with a permit whose investor did not obtain a use permit; a building or special part deviating from the building permit; construction on someone else's land; buildings under construction with a permit |
| Security | Fiduciary transfer of ownership; mortgage on a building under construction; notice of commencement of the mortgagee's satisfaction; notice of the out-of-court sale of the mortgaged thing; priority ranking for a future entry |
| Family and succession | Divorce proceedings; rights of heirs; joint ownership of assets in an estate |
| Special regimes | Public good; restitution; sea shore and maritime domain under the maritime domain legislation; the burden concerning management of hospitality facilities under the tourism and hospitality legislation; appointment and revocation of a building manager; temporary structures with a permit |
| Notarial | Immediate enforceability of a notarial record; annotation of a notarial record with the designation of the transaction |
Under Article 98, the administrative authority permits the annotation by decision, on the request of an authorised person, a court or another state body.
Four of these should stop a purchase on the spot
Read commercially, several entries in that list are not information — they are the answer.
The four construction annotations. The Act distinguishes a building started without a permit, a building completed without one, a building that has a permit but no use permit, and a building that deviates from its permit. Those are four different legal problems with four different cures, and the distinction is drawn on the register itself. The permitting chain behind them is set out in our building permit guide, and the acceptance stage in our use permit guide.
The management burden on hospitality units. The list includes an annotation of the burden concerning the management of hospitality facilities under the tourism legislation. That is the register-side face of the condo and mixed-model regime: a unit sold in a five-star hotel is registered with the manager's management right attached to it. What that burden actually commits the owner to is set out in our guide to the two statutory hotel models.
Notice of out-of-court sale. The presence of an annotation recording the commencement of a mortgagee's satisfaction, or the out-of-court sale of the mortgaged property, means enforcement is already running against the asset without a court judgment being required.
Bankruptcy. An annotation of bankruptcy, or of its commencement, changes the entire analysis, because from that point the collective procedure governs — including the estate's ability to challenge earlier transactions, covered in our insolvency guide.
| Annotation on the extract | What it actually tells you | Reasonable next step |
|---|---|---|
| Building started or built without a permit | The structure is unlawful, not merely undocumented | Establish whether any legalisation route is still open before pricing |
| Permit obtained, use permit not | Construction may be lawful but occupation and onward sale are constrained | Ask for the technical inspection position |
| Deviates from the building permit | The as-built differs from what was approved | Obtain the approved design and compare, do not rely on the annotation alone |
| Bankruptcy or commencement of bankruptcy | A collective procedure now governs the owner's assets | Stop and take advice; earlier transactions may be challengeable |
| Enforcement on the property | A creditor is already realising the asset | Establish whose claim and at what stage |
| Notice of out-of-court sale of a mortgaged thing | Sale can proceed without a court judgment | Treat as urgent, not procedural |
| Prohibition on alienation and encumbrance | The owner cannot validly transfer | Do not proceed on the basis that it will be lifted |
| Claim for deletion of an entry, or dispute over rights | Title is contested | You cannot buy in ignorance of it once it is recorded |
| Commenced adverse possession proceedings | Someone is claiming ownership through possession | Establish how long possession has run |
| Hospitality management burden | The unit is inside a condo or mixed-model hotel structure | Read the management and letting contracts before the price |
The two annotations you request rather than fear
For anyone whose position depends on winning a dispute, two entries on the Article 98 list are tools rather than warnings.
The first is the annotation of a claim for deletion of an entry, alongside the more general annotation of the commencement of a dispute to establish rights or to delete an executed entry. The second is the annotation of commenced adverse possession proceedings.
Their function is the same: to put every subsequent searcher on notice that the entry is contested. A purchaser who buys after an annotation appears cannot credibly claim to have been unaware of the dispute — and, as set out in our guide to wrong register entries, the good faith of an acquirer of Montenegrin land is not protected by the automatic statutory rule that applies to goods. Making the dispute visible is therefore doing real legal work, not merely administrative housekeeping.
Because the authority permits an annotation by decision on the request of a court or another state body as well as an authorised person, the annotation route is available as part of proceedings rather than only as a separate application.
Why annotations matter more here than in a register with a positive guarantee
In some systems a buyer who relies on a clean register is protected by the register itself, and annotations mainly serve to warn. Montenegro's Property Act does not provide that automatic protection for land: its acquisition-from-a-non-owner rule is written for movable things, and the position of a good-faith buyer of immovables is worked out on the facts rather than delivered by the entry.
That raises the practical weight of the annotation. Where the register does not itself cure a defective chain, the visible record of a dispute becomes the main mechanism by which later purchasers are fixed with knowledge — and knowledge is precisely what the good-faith analysis turns on. An annotation is therefore not a formality that runs alongside the litigation; in a system built this way, it is part of the litigation strategy.
The corollary for a buyer is equally direct. An extract with no annotations is a better document than one full of them, but it is not a guarantee, and it does not replace tracing the chain that produced the current entry.
Where the appeal goes
The consolidation also sets out the review path in the exposure procedure by which cadastre data are established. Holders of rights may lodge an objection to provisionally recorded data with the exposure commission within eight days of learning of the data, and at the latest by the end of the exposure. Against the commission's decision determining the data, an appeal lies to the Ministry within eight days of receipt, and against the Ministry's decision an administrative dispute may be brought. Entry is then made on the basis of the commission's enforceable decision, against which no appeal lies although an administrative dispute remains available.
Those deadlines are short. They are also exactly the kind of provision most likely to have been touched by the 2025 amendment, which is why the caveat at the top of this page is not boilerplate. Confirm the period before you rely on it.
What this page does not claim
It does not give the current article numbering, because the consolidation available to us predates the most recent amendment. It does not state the fee or the form of an annotation application. And it does not tell you whether an annotation will be permitted in your case, which is a decision for the authority on the documents you put in front of it.
What it does is name the categories, so that a title extract stops being a one-line document. Reading the extract itself — the columns, the abbreviations and what silence in a field means — is covered in our guide to reading a title extract.
Checked on 26 August 2026, in the consolidated text described at the top.
Before you sign, and before you sue
Two questions for a buyer, two for a litigant. Does the extract carry any of the four construction annotations, and has anyone established which of the four it is, because they are not interchangeable? Is there an annotation of bankruptcy, enforcement, or a mortgagee's out-of-court sale that means the asset is already committed?
And if you are the one disputing: has a claim-for-deletion annotation been requested, so that anyone buying from your opponent buys with notice? If your position rests on possession rather than on a document, has the adverse possession proceeding been annotated as well?
Send us the extract and we will tell you what each annotation is doing, which of them is fatal to the transaction and which is merely noise. This work sits in our title cancellation and registration practice.
