A foreign owner usually discovers a Montenegrin building dispute in the past tense. The façade contract is signed. The loft conversion is approved. The restaurant below has been extracting cooking smoke into the courtyard for a season. The question is no longer what the assembly should do — it is what can still be done about what it did.
There is an answer, and it is narrower than most owners expect, because it runs on a clock.
Two statutes, and only one of them has a courtroom in it
Montenegrin residential buildings sit under two acts at once.
The Zakon o održavanju stambenih zgrada (Sl. list CG 41/2016, 84/2018, 111/2022, 140/2022, 84/2024) governs the money and the works: who votes, what the manager does, where the maintenance account sits, what the housing inspector checks. Those are covered elsewhere on this site — how the assembly decides, what the manager controls, how costs are shared and what the inspector can order.
The Zakon o svojinsko-pravnim odnosima (Sl. list CG 19/2009 and 29/2025) governs ownership itself: what the building is as a legal entity, what an assembly decision does to an owner who voted against it, and what one neighbour may demand of another.
The division matters for a practical reason. Read the maintenance act end to end and you will not find the words tužba, poništaj, or nadležni sud — it contains no action, no annulment, and no court. Every litigation clock in Montenegrin building law sits in the Property Relations Act. The maintenance act does not ignore the older statute; its Article 33 sends the housing inspector to verify duties defined in Article 178 of the Property Relations Act. The two are complementary, not competing.
One amendment note, because it is widely misread. The Property Relations Act was amended once, in 2025 (Sl. list CG 29/2025). That amendment touched three things only: Article 415 on foreign acquisition, Article 416, and a new Article 422a. Articles 161 to 192 on unit ownership and Articles 250 to 268 on neighbour rights stand in their 2009 wording.
The building is a legal person, and that decides who you sue
Article 163 is short and consequential: a residential building has the capacity of a legal person in legal transactions relating to the maintenance and use of the building.
For an owner, this settles the identity of the other side. A dispute about the façade contract, the maintenance account or the works programme is not a dispute against thirty-nine co-owners individually. The building itself holds that capacity, and acts through the organs the statute gives it.
It also cuts the other way. When the building brings proceedings, the outcome reaches the owners — which is the reason Article 192 exists at all.
What the assembly may decide by a show of hands, and what it may not
Article 186 sets the thresholds inside the Property Relations Act.
The assembly decides if more than half of its members are present, and each owner has one vote.
- Ordinary maintenance and urgent works — a majority of the members present.
- Anything beyond the frame of ordinary maintenance — expressly including superstructure (nadogradnja), converting special or common parts into business premises, and necessary works — requires the consent of members holding more than half of the total floor area of the special parts of the building.
That second rule is the one absent owners should read twice. It is not a headcount. A decision to build on top of the building, or to turn a common part into commercial space, is measured in square metres, not in raised hands, and a small number of large units can carry it.
Two mechanics complete the picture. Where the owners' rules provide that only some owners bear the cost of maintaining particular parts, those rules may confine the vote on those costs to those owners. And a vote is treated as having taken place where owners give written consent according to the same criteria — so a decision can be assembled without a meeting you were invited to attend.
Thirty days, running from publication
Article 187 is the provision that decides most of these disputes before they start.
Decisions of the assembly are binding on all owners and on the manager. They are published in the manner the assembly itself determines. And:
Against a decision of the assembly an owner may bring an action before the competent court for its annulment within 30 days of the day the decision was published.
Three things follow, and each of them catches non-resident owners.
The clock starts at publication, not at notice to you. The assembly determines the manner of publication. A notice board in the entrance hall is a manner of publication. An owner who spends ten months a year in another country can exhaust the period without ever having seen the decision.
It is thirty days, not thirty working days, and the statute attaches it to a decision that is already binding in the meantime.
The route is an action for annulment before the competent court — the statute says nadležnom sudu and does not name a tier. It is a claim to set the decision aside, not an appeal to a supervisory body, and not a complaint to the housing inspector, whose powers are directed at duties under the maintenance act rather than at the validity of a vote.
If a decision matters to you — a façade levy, a conversion, a superstructure — the practical protection is not vigilance after the fact. It is arranging in advance to be told when decisions are published.
When the building goes to court and you were against it
Article 192 is the provision almost nobody reads until the costs order arrives, and it is deliberately one-sided.
When the building decides to commence proceedings, an owner who did not agree may be released from liability for the consequences of the dispute in the event of failure, by submitting a request to the manager. The request must reach the manager within 30 days of the day of notification of the assembly's decision.
Then the asymmetry:
If the outcome of the dispute is in favour of the owners, the owner who did not agree to the litigation but who draws a benefit from it is obliged to participate in bearing all the costs falling on the other owners.
So the dissenting owner can opt out of the downside and cannot opt out of the upside. Disagreeing with a lawsuit does not buy a free ride on a win; it buys protection against a loss, and only if the request was filed in time and in the right hands — the manager, not the assembly, not the president.
Note the difference between the two clocks. Article 187 runs from publication of the decision. Article 192 runs from notification of it. They are both thirty days and they are not the same day.
The house rules are a public document
Article 191 governs the pravila vlasnika — the owners' rules on special and common parts, the conditions of their enjoyment, the use of common parts, the distribution of costs, the preservation of the building's appearance and management.
They are adopted by a majority of the members present, and any owner may initiate their adoption. They are then deposited in a register kept by the competent local administration body, and — the part that is useful before you buy rather than after —
any interested person may inspect the content of the owners' rules.
That is a due-diligence document available to a buyer who has not yet signed anything. It tells you what the building has already decided about short-term letting, façade alterations, pets, the use of terraces and the allocation of costs, and it is on a public register rather than in the seller's drawer.
The neighbour standard is not "annoying" — it is "beyond customary"
Article 266 is Montenegro's immissions rule, and it is more precise than the general nuisance intuition most buyers arrive with.
An owner must refrain from acts, and remove causes originating from their property, which make the use of other properties more difficult — the statute lists the carrying over of smoke, unpleasant odours, heat, soot, vibration, noise, the run-off of waste water and the like. The threshold is met where the interference is:
- beyond the measure customary given the nature and purpose of the property and local circumstances; or
- causing significant damage; or
- impermissible under a special regulation.
Local circumstances are part of the test. The same extraction fan can be within the customary measure in a commercial street and beyond it in a residential building — that is the statute working as intended, not inconsistency.
Causing such interference by special devices without a particular legal basis is prohibited outright.
Owners exposed to excessive immissions may require the owner of the source property to remove the causes, to compensate the damage caused, and to refrain in future from doing on their property what causes the excessive immissions until every measure to prevent them has been taken.
Then the exception that changes commercial disputes:
Exceptionally, where excessive immissions originate from an activity for which a competent authority has issued a permit, the exposed owners have no right, for as long as that permit lasts, to demand the prohibition of that activity — but they may claim compensation for damage and the taking of appropriate measures to prevent or reduce future excessive immissions or damage.
A licensed restaurant, workshop or plant is therefore not shut down by this article while its permit runs. It pays, and it mitigates. An owner who bought expecting a closure order has misread the remedy.
Finally, an owner whose property faces a foreseeable danger of impermissible immissions that they would not be obliged to tolerate may require that appropriate preventive measures be determined and carried out — a claim that does not wait for the damage.
Your neighbour must let you in, and you must pay for it
Two articles handle physical access, and both run in each direction.
Article 267. An owner may use parts of the neighbouring land where this is necessary for the repair or demolition of a building on their own land. A landowner must allow access for retrieving a strayed animal, a swarm of bees, fruit from a tree on the neighbouring property, or objects that ended up there by natural forces or by accident. A neighbour who suffers damage from that use is entitled to compensation. Where a strayed animal caused the damage, the owner may retain it until its owner appears — but not longer than three days.
Article 268. An owner who must carry out works necessary for the use of their property may temporarily use the neighbouring land — putting up scaffolding and the like — where it cannot be done otherwise. Appropriate compensation is payable on the neighbour's request, and whoever used the land must, as soon as the need ends, restore it to its previous condition and compensate the damage caused.
For a renovation in an old coastal building where scaffolding cannot stand anywhere but next door, this is the legal basis — and the reason the neighbour's consent is a price negotiation rather than a veto.
What an owner who is usually elsewhere should actually do
The clocks are the whole problem. Every remedy in this article is available; most are lost by the calendar rather than on the merits.
- Ask the manager, in writing, to send published decisions to a named email address. Publication on a notice board is enough for Article 187; an email arrangement is what makes the thirty days usable.
- Read the owners' rules before you buy — they are on a register open to any interested person under Article 191, so this needs no cooperation from the seller.
- Before a superstructure or conversion vote, establish the floor-area position, not the headcount. Article 186 measures those decisions in square metres.
- If the building resolves to litigate and you disagree, the Article 192 request goes to the manager, within thirty days of notification — and understand that it protects you against a loss, not against a share of the costs of a win you benefit from.
- With an immissions problem, gather evidence of the permit position early. Whether the source activity is licensed decides whether you are seeking a prohibition or only damages and mitigation.
Whose side we are on, and how we are paid
RoNa Legal DOO works for owners and buyers, not for developers, managers or maintenance companies. We are paid by the client we act for, and by no one else in the transaction — we take no commission, referral fee or share of any contract we review.
Work that requires representation before a Montenegrin court or state authority is carried out by an advocate admitted to the Montenegrin Bar. Our own role is the preparatory and advisory layer: reading the decision and its publication trail, fixing the date the clock started, checking the majority actually achieved against Article 186, and preparing the file the advocate uses.
If a decision has already been published
If an assembly decision has been published and you think it is defective, the date of publication is the first fact to establish, because it decides whether anything else matters. Send us the decision, the notice of the session, and any record of how and when it was published, and we will tell you where the thirty days stand.
If the problem is a neighbour rather than the building, send a description of the interference and, if you know it, whether the source activity holds a permit.
