This is the sequence, not the encyclopaedia. Each step below says what to obtain, who can obtain it, what it settles and — the part usually left out — what it leaves open. Where a step deserves a full treatment, it links to the page that gives it one.
One principle organises the order: run the checks that can end the transaction before the checks that cost money. Most buyers do the reverse, commissioning surveys and arranging transfers while the questions that would have stopped everything remain unasked.
Before you view anything: two free checks
Check the listing itself. Since the 2025 mediation law took effect, advertising a property without stating the agency's name and its number in the register of mediators is prohibited. A listing that does not identify a registered agency has told you something before you have spent an hour. Who is regulated in this market, and who is not, is mapped in our note on what a Montenegro investment advisor can and cannot do.
Map the introductions. Write down who introduced you to the agent, the lawyer, the notary and the bank. If one person appears in more than two of those boxes, that is a structural finding, not a coincidence — and it is the common factor in the patterns set out in our note on property scams and legal recourse.
Step 1 — The property folio, obtained independently
The list nepokretnosti is the register extract for the unit, and it is the single most disqualifying document in the sequence. Read it for the registered owner and their share, the annotations, any mortgage, and whether the thing described matches the thing you were shown.
The operational point foreign buyers rarely hear: you generally cannot pull the certified extract yourself. Access to the electronically signed version runs through the Montenegrin eID scheme, so in practice a foreign buyer obtains it through a lawyer, a notary or an authorised representative. That is a reason to have counsel engaged before the folio is needed, not after. How to read the sheets is in our title deed guide.
Gate: if the seller's name is not on the folio, or the share does not cover what is being sold, stop here and resolve it before anything else happens.
Step 2 — Permits, by number
Ask for the building permit and, for a completed building, the use permit — the numbers, not a description. An unpermitted structure is not a discount; it can face a prohibition on disposal, which is a different category of problem from a fine. What the permit position means in practice is set out in our use permit guide.
Gate: "legalisation in progress" is an answer that must be evidenced from documents. If it cannot be, the transaction is not ready to price.
Step 3 — What is actually being sold
This is where coastal purchases go wrong most quietly. Establish, parcel by parcel, what the sale includes: the unit, the land, the parking space, the terrace, the strip between the terrace and the water.
On the coast, part of what looks like private grounds may sit within the maritime domain, which is state property in general use. Rights over such areas are typically held under concession or a use contract rather than owned outright — which means they can be time-limited and terminable, and they should not be paid for as though they were freehold. If any part of the plot touches the shore, this question needs a documented answer before the price is agreed.
Gate: if the price implicitly includes something the seller cannot convey, the price is wrong, not merely the paperwork.
Step 4 — The seller's capacity to sell
Confirm who is signing and on what authority. Co-owners must all consent to what is being sold. An estate that has not been through probate cannot be conveyed by whoever is living in the house. A company signatory must actually hold the power. And where a representative signs, read the power of attorney itself — its scope, its date and its certification chain — rather than accepting its existence; the form rules are in our power of attorney guide.
Gate: an original instrument that nobody will show you is a finding.
Step 5 — The tax base, which decides more than tax
Establish which regime the transaction falls in — transfer tax on a resale, VAT on a first supply, never both — and what the taxable base will be. The base is the market value at acquisition, and where the stated price is below market the tax authority determines the value itself. The rates, bands and the fifteen-day filing machinery are in our transfer tax and VAT guide.
If residence is any part of your objective, this step stops being a tax question. The assessed base is also the residence threshold test, and it arrives after the contract is signed — the sequencing problem we set out in the €150,000 route read as law.
Step 6 — The contract and the payment structure
By now the questions are commercial rather than investigative. What is the money characterised as, and what happens to it if the deal fails? Are instalments tied to milestones or to dates? Does the contract contain the seller's unconditional consent to registration? Are the findings from steps 1 to 5 reflected as conditions, or were they merely discussed?
The deposit's legal character is treated in our deposit rules guide, the instalment structure in our off-plan guide, and the clause-level review in our preliminary contract checklist.
Step 7 — Completion, and the gap that follows it
Signing is not owning. Between the notarial act and registration there is an interval, and as between competing buyers, Montenegrin law gives the property to the one who registers in good faith. That is why the registration application is not an administrative afterthought and why the interval should be as short as the file allows.
| Step | Document | Who can obtain it | What it closes | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Property folio | Lawyer, notary or authorised representative | Ownership, shares, mortgages, annotations | Physical condition; permits; boundaries on the ground |
| 2 | Building and use permits | Seller, verified against the authority | Whether the structure is lawful and transferable | Quality of construction; unpermitted later alterations |
| 3 | Parcel and domain position | Cadastre data plus, on the coast, the domain question | What is capable of being sold | Whether the price reflects it |
| 4 | Authority to sell | Seller, co-owners, probate file, power of attorney | Who may lawfully sign | Whether they intend to perform |
| 5 | Tax assessment basis | Tax authority, after the contract | The tax band and, if relevant, the residence test | Nothing before signature — which is the problem |
| 6 | The contract | Your own counsel, drafting or reviewing | The allocation of risk between the parties | Everything you did not put in it |
| 7 | Registration | Filed after the notarial act | Ownership itself | Nothing, once complete |
What runs in parallel, and what cannot
The seven steps are ordered by disqualifying power, not by calendar. In practice several of them run at once, and knowing which ones are genuinely sequential saves a week.
Steps 1 to 4 — folio, permits, what is being sold, authority to sell — can all be commissioned on the same day, because each is answered from a document held by a different source. There is no reason to wait for the folio before asking for permit numbers.
Step 5 is the one that cannot be pulled forward. The assessed tax base only exists once the transaction has generated a liability, so no amount of preparation produces it earlier. That asymmetry is the reason step 6 exists in the form it does: the contract is where a fact you cannot obtain in time gets converted into a condition, a retained tranche or an allocated risk.
And step 7 should be compressed, not merely completed. The interval between the notarial act and registration is the only window in which the competing-buyer rule can operate against you.
What due diligence does not tell you
Worth stating, because a clean legal file is regularly mistaken for a clean purchase. None of the checks above speaks to the physical condition of the building, to what may be built on the plot next door, to the solvency of a developer whose permits are all in order, or to whether a counterparty who is entitled to perform actually intends to. Those are commercial and technical questions, answered by surveyors, accounts and negotiation rather than by the register.
The legal file tells you whether the thing can lawfully be sold to you and on what terms. It does not tell you whether you should buy it.
Where buyers actually skip
Not out of carelessness. The three steps most often abandoned are the ones that feel adversarial: asking a friendly seller for permit numbers, asking a representative to produce an original power of attorney, and asking what the terrace legally is. Each of them sounds like distrust and is in fact routine, and each of them is the exact question the patterns in this market are built to survive.
The fourth thing skipped is engaging counsel early enough to run steps 1 to 3 at all — which is a scheduling problem more than a budget one. Our guide to engaging a lawyer in Montenegro covers how to verify who you are instructing, and our Turkish due diligence guide is the counterpart to this page for readers buying there.
Before you transfer anything
Send us the listing, the folio reference and the draft contract, and tell us which of the seven steps above has already been done and by whom. We will tell you which gates are actually closed, which are open, and what the contract would need to say to keep the open ones from becoming your problem. That work sits with our Montenegro property practice.
