There is a category of Montenegrin title problem that no amount of price negotiation fixes, because it is not a defect in the seller's ownership. The seller owns the flat. The seller can sell it. And once you own it, a named person may still be entitled to live there — to the exclusion of everybody, including you — for the rest of their life.
That is a personal servitude, and Montenegrin law recognises three of them. They are governed by articles 222 to 249 of the Zakon o svojinsko-pravnim odnosima, and they are visible in the property record before you sign, in a specific sheet, if you know to look.
Three rights, not one
Article 222. The personal servitudes are: the right of usufruct (pravo plodouživanja), the right of use (pravo upotrebe), and the right of habitation (pravo stanovanja).
The distinction matters, because the three behave differently in the one respect a buyer cares about most — whether the holder can put somebody else in the property.
Article 223 — usufruct. The widest right to use another's thing (the servient property) and to gather its fruits, with the obligation to preserve its substance. The holder must exercise the right with the care of a good householder.
Article 244 — right of use. The holder may use the thing and gather fruits from it within the limits of their own personal needs and the needs of their family members, without impairing the substance. Everything the property yields beyond that belongs to the owner.
Article 248 — right of habitation. The holder is entitled, to the exclusion of all other persons, to use another's residential building or an apartment as a separate part of a building for the purpose of dwelling. Members of their household, persons who support them, and persons needed for running the household may live with them — and only for the duration of that person's life.
The line that surprises foreign buyers
Search this topic in English, German or Italian and you will read that these rights are personal and therefore cannot be transferred. In Montenegro that is true of two of the three and false of the most valuable one.
Article 230. The usufructuary may transfer to another, by legal transaction (a lease, a loan for use and the like), the benefits which the servient property yields, unless that right has been taken away from them.
By contrast, article 245 states flatly that the right of use is non-transferable, and article 248 says the same of the right of habitation.
So a usufruct registered against the flat you are buying may mean not only that the holder can use it, but that the holder can let it out to a tenant — and collect the rent — while you hold the title. The rent is theirs, not yours.
Where it lives in the record
Montenegro keeps a single register of real estate and rights over it, and the basic document is the list nepokretnosti. Its structure is fixed by article 53 of the Zakon o državnom premjeru i katastru nepokretnosti:
- A sheet — the land, the parcel
- B sheet — the holder of rights on that parcel
- V sheet — buildings and separate parts of buildings, and the holders of rights over them (with V, part 1 for utility lines)
- 🔴 G sheet — encumbrances and restrictions
A registered usufruct or habitation right is an encumbrance. It appears in the G sheet. Not in A, not in B, not in V — which is why a check that stops at "who is the registered owner" misses it entirely.
Two further provisions of the same act decide how much weight that sheet carries:
- Article 9 — publicity. Anyone has the right to inspect the data the cadastre contains, and to be issued a list nepokretnosti or a certificate that a given property or right is registered.
- 🔴 Article 10 — reliability. Data on properties and rights registered in the cadastre are deemed accurate, and no one may suffer adverse consequences in property transactions and other relations in which those data are used.
Article 55 adds that a certified list nepokretnosti and an extract from it are public documents, and that the administration must issue them within three days of a request.
Read together, these are not bureaucratic details. They mean the information was available to you, cheaply, before you signed.
How the right got there in the first place
🔴 Article 226. Usufruct is acquired on the basis of a contract, a will, and acquisitive prescription (održaj). For acquisition of usufruct over immovable property on the basis of a contract or a will, registration in the cadastre is required; for acquisition by održaj, the provisions on acquiring ownership by održaj apply accordingly.
Articles 247 and 249 route the right of use and the right of habitation through the same rules on creation and termination.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the contract-based or will-based right you need to worry about is, by definition, a registered one — so the G sheet is where the search ends, not where it begins. Second, održaj is the exception: a right acquired by long possession does not depend on that registration, which is why the physical inspection of the property is not optional either.
Article 225 confirms the object may be movable or immovable property. Article 224 allows the scope to be narrowed by excluding particular benefits the thing yields, and allows the right to be created under a condition, with a time limit, or with a charge attached — so the entry you find may be narrower than the statutory default, and the deed behind it is worth reading.
When it ends — including the clock nobody mentions
🔴 Article 240. Usufruct terminates:
- by lapse of time, where it was established for a definite period, and at the latest on the death of the usufructuary (or on the dissolution of the legal person);
- when the capacities of owner and usufructuary merge in the same person;
- when a third party acquires usufruct or ownership over the same servient property by održaj;
- 🔴 by non-exercise of the usufruct for five years, provided the usufructuary was not prevented from exercising it;
- by the holder's renunciation;
- on the lapse of 30 years, where the servitude was established in favour of a legal person.
The five-year rule is the one that changes negotiations. A lifetime habitation right whose holder moved abroad years ago and has not used the flat is not necessarily still alive as a right — but "not necessarily" is not a conclusion. It is a question with a factual answer, and the answer is worth establishing before completion rather than after.
Article 241 keeps the right alive on the remainder if the property is partly destroyed. Article 242 ends it definitively on total destruction, even if the owner rebuilds at their own expense. And 🔴 article 243 extends the right to the insurance sum paid out, and — if the owner uses that sum to rebuild — to the new property.
Who pays for what while it runs
This is where owners are most often surprised, because the burden does not sit where intuition puts it.
- 🔴 Article 233. Public charges and other public obligations that burden the fruits and the current use of the property fall on the usufructuary, pro rata to the duration. All other burdens fall on the owner. If the usufructuary has paid burdens belonging to the owner, the owner must reimburse them when the usufruct ends.
- Article 234. The usufructuary must use the thing as a good householder and maintain it, at their own expense, in the condition in which it was received.
- Article 236. The usufructuary bears the cost of regular maintenance. For costs they were not obliged to bear, the rules on unauthorised conduct of another's affairs apply.
- Article 235. The usufructuary must notify the owner of extraordinary works needed to preserve the thing, and must tolerate those works.
- 🔴 Article 232. The usufructuary must insure the property at their own cost, in the owner's favour, against fire and other risks, where insurance is mandatory or where local understanding makes it a rule of good-householder conduct. Where the property was already insured, they pay the premiums pro rata.
For the right of use, article 246 splits public charges and regular maintenance between holder and owner in proportion to the benefits each derives and to the duration of the right.
Two provisions worth using rather than merely knowing
🔴 Article 237 — the inventory. The owner or the usufructuary may at any time demand that an inventory and valuation of the servient property be made at joint expense; whoever demands it advances the necessary funds. And then the sting:
If the inventory and valuation have not been made, it is presumed that the usufructuary received the property in usable condition of medium quality.
An owner who never took an inventory and later argues the flat came back damaged is arguing against a statutory presumption. The inventory is cheap; the presumption is not.
🔴 Article 239 — security. An owner of the servient property whose rights are in danger may demand security from the usufructuary. If the usufructuary does not provide it, the property may be taken from them and entrusted for management to a person appointed by the court — and it may be entrusted to the owner.
Article 238 governs the handover at the end: return in the condition received, with no compensation owed for the reduced value that results from regular and purposeful use; for consumable things, the value is paid instead.
What to do before you sign
- Obtain the list nepokretnosti yourself and read the G sheet, not just the ownership entry. Article 9 gives you the right to it and article 55 gives the administration three days.
- If you find an entry, ask for the underlying deed. Article 224 means the right may be conditional, time-limited or narrower than the default, and article 230 means a usufruct may carry a power to let the property out.
- Establish which of the three rights it is. Habitation (article 248) ends with the holder's life and cannot be transferred; usufruct (article 230) can be commercially exploited.
- Ask when it was last exercised. Article 240's five-year non-use rule is a real termination ground, not a technicality.
- Inspect the property physically. Article 226 registers contractual and testamentary rights, but održaj does not depend on that entry.
- If a right is to be released as part of the deal, deal with the release in the contract and in the register — and take the article 237 inventory while the position is still friendly.
On the neighbouring frameworks: rights of way and servitudes on your plot, co-ownership shares and forced division, and, where an entry is already being disputed, disturbance of possession and the thirty-day remedy.
Whose side we are on, and how we are paid
RoNa Legal DOO works for owners and buyers, not for developers, agents or sellers. We are paid by the client we act for and by nobody else in the transaction: no commissions, no referral fees, no share in the contract we are reviewing.
Work that requires representation before a Montenegrin court or state authority is carried out by an advocate admitted to the Montenegrin Bar. Our role is the preparatory and advisory layer: pulling the list nepokretnosti, reading the G sheet against the deed behind it, identifying which of the three rights is registered, and telling you what it does to the use of the property you are about to buy.
If there is an entry on the title you do not understand
Send us the list nepokretnosti and, if you have it, the contract or decision the entry refers to. From those two documents the first answer — what the right is, who holds it, what it permits, and when it ends — comes quickly.
