Buyers who have done any homework on Montenegro know the spouse rule: a property registered to one married person may already belong to two. It is the best-known trap in the system, and we have written about it twice.
It is also not the only one, and the other two behave differently from it — differently enough that the checks which answer the spouse question answer neither of them. One concerns a child who owns, or part-owns, the property. The other concerns a family community, where the statute does something the spouse rule pointedly does not: it protects the buyer who relied on the register.
Article numbers below are from the consolidated Porodični zakon — "Službeni list RCG" 001/07 of 09.01.2007, "Službeni list CG" 053/16 of 11.08.2016 and 076/20 of 28.07.2020, in a consolidation stamped 2023 — read on 5 September 2026. General information, not advice on a specific transaction.
How a child ends up on a Montenegrin title
Rarely by purchase. Almost always by inheritance — a grandparent dies, the estate is distributed, and a minor takes a share alongside adults — or by gift, often made for tax or succession reasons by a parent who did not think through what it does to the ability to sell.
Once the child is on the sheet, Article 307(1) sets the baseline: property the child did not acquire through its own work is managed and disposed of, until the child's majority, by the parents, in the child's favour. Article 307(2) carves out the opposite case — property the child acquired by its own work is managed by the child independently.
That sounds like ordinary parental authority. Article 308 then removes the most important part of it.
Article 308(2): the approval, and the purposes it is tied to
Article 308(2) provides that parents may alienate or encumber immovable things, more valuable movable things and rights from the child's property only with the approval of the competent guardianship authority — and only for the child's maintenance, treatment, upbringing and education, or where another important interest of the child so requires.
Two limits sit in that sentence, and buyers routinely notice only the first.
The first is procedural: no approval, no power. A parent signing a sale of a minor's share without it is not disposing of a defect-free title; the seller lacks the authority the contract assumes.
The second is substantive, and harder. The approval is not a general licence to sell. Article 308(2) ties it to stated purposes — maintenance, treatment, upbringing, education — with a residual category of "another important interest of the child". A transaction structured so that the proceeds serve the parents' plans rather than the child's does not fit those purposes merely because a form was signed. This is why the useful question in diligence is not is there an approval but what was the approval given for, and does this transaction still match it.
Article 308(1) is the same idea one level down: income from the child's property may be used primarily for the child's maintenance, treatment, upbringing and education, and for maintaining members of the immediate family only where they lack sufficient means of their own.
Article 84 gives the guardianship authority the enforcement tools. In justified cases it may require parents to account for their management of the child's property; it may ask the court, in non-contentious proceedings, to allow security to be taken over the parents' own property to protect the child's property rights; and it may ask the court to rule that the parents hold the role of guardian in respect of managing the child's property.
Age changes the picture but does not remove the approval. Under Article 66(1) a child may undertake legal acts with the parents' prior or subsequent consent, and with the guardianship authority's consent for the acts covered by Article 308(2). Under Article 66(2) a child who has reached 15 may independently undertake acts managing and disposing of earnings or property acquired by their own work — which is Article 307(2) seen from the child's side, and does not extend to inherited land. Article 73(3) completes it: parents may take legal acts managing the income of a child under 15.
The ward, and the one signal the register can give you
Where the owner is under guardianship rather than parental care — a minor with no parent exercising the parental right, or an adult placed under guardianship — the gatekeeping provision is Article 201(1). A guardian may, only with the guardianship authority's approval: interrupt the ward's schooling or change the type of school (point 1); decide on the ward's occupation (point 2); take other more important measures concerning the ward's person (point 3); alienate or encumber the ward's immovable property (point 4); alienate movables of greater or special personal value, or dispose of property rights of greater value (point 5); declare a renunciation of an inheritance, legacy or gift (point 6); and take other measures prescribed by law (point 7).
Article 201(2) then does something worth quoting to any client who assumes approval is a rubber stamp: in granting approval for the disposal or management of the ward's property or rights, the guardianship authority determines the purpose of the funds obtained and supervises their use. The money is followed after the sale, not only before it.
And Article 193 is the one provision in this area that produces a searchable signal. Where a ward has immovable property, the guardianship authority is obliged to notify the authority keeping the real-estate records of the placing under guardianship and of its termination. A guardianship that has been properly notified is therefore capable of showing up in the property records — which makes the absence of any such note evidence of very little, but its presence a matter to resolve before signing.
The family community — and the rule that runs the other way
Article 310 creates a form of joint ownership most foreign buyers have never heard of. Where children and other relatives live in a family community with the spouses or cohabiting partners and work on the agricultural holding, jointly carry on other activities, or otherwise earn jointly, property acquired during that community is the joint property of all members of the family community who participated in acquiring it.
Article 311(1) has that property managed and disposed of jointly and by agreement. Article 311(2) adds a provision that surprises people: minor members of the family community who have reached 15 participate in managing and disposing of the joint property independently. Article 311(3) allows management to be entrusted by common consent to some of the members, decisions then being taken by majority, and Article 311(4) lets any member ask for that delegation to be revoked, with the court deciding in non-contentious proceedings if the others disagree.
Then comes the divergence. Article 312(1) requires the members' rights over jointly owned immovables to be registered in the names of all contributing members with undetermined shares. Article 312(2) provides that where only one member — or some of them — is registered as owner, the registered person is treated as the owner until the other members have a note of the joint ownership right (zabilježba) entered in the register on their application.
Article 312(3) is the operative rule for a buyer. A contract by which the registered member alienated or encumbered immovable property acquired in the family community may be challenged by the other members only if, at the time the contract was concluded, the note of joint ownership was on the register — or if they had at that time unmistakably made the third party aware that the property was jointly owned. Article 312(4) applies a bad-faith test to movables, and Article 312(5) confines the other members to an internal remedy: a corresponding share of other assets and claims, or monetary compensation from the member who sold.
The three regimes are not variations of one rule
| Spouses (Art. 289) | Family community (Art. 312) | Child / ward (Arts. 308, 201) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Register effect | One name is deemed to be both, unless the entry rests on a written contract between the spouses | The registered member is the owner until a zabilježba is entered | The child is the registered owner; the constraint is on who may sign |
| What defeats the family claim | Very little — the presumption runs against the register | A clean register plus the third party not having been told | Nothing on the register; only a valid, purpose-matched approval |
| Buyer's real protection | Getting the spouse into the deed | The absence of a zabilježba, checked at the moment of contract | The guardianship authority's approval, and its stated purpose |
| Who else must sign | The other spouse | All contributing members; those aged 15+ act independently | Parents and the guardianship authority |
The comparison matters because a buyer who has learned the spouse rule tends to generalise from it — to assume the register is unreliable across the board, or, having got a spousal consent, to assume the family questions are closed. Article 312 rewards register diligence in a way Article 289 does not, and Article 308(2) is not a register question at all.
What to do with the extract
The practical checks follow from the statute rather than from custom. Read the ownership sheet for anyone who is or may be a minor and treat that as a stop, not a footnote — the transaction then needs the parents and the guardianship authority, and the approval has to match Article 308(2)'s purposes. Look for a note about guardianship, which Article 193 requires to be notified for a ward's immovable property. Look for a zabilježba of joint ownership, because Article 312(3) makes its presence or absence at the moment of contract the whole question. And where the property is a farm, a family business or anything worked by several relatives, ask who actually earned it, because Article 310 attaches rights to contribution rather than to registration, and Article 311(2) gives a fifteen-year-old a signature of their own.
Before you sign anything with a family name on it
If a Montenegrin property you are buying, lending against or inheriting has a minor, a ward or an extended family on the ownership sheet, send us the list nepokretnosti, the chain of how each owner acquired their share, and any approval that has already been obtained. We will identify whose signature the transaction actually needs, whether an Article 308(2) approval covers the transaction as structured or only as originally described, and whether Article 312(3) leaves the other family members with anything to challenge. The marriage version of the same problem is in one name on the deed, two owners in law and when the person selling isn't the person who can sell; how minors end up on titles in the first place is in inheritance for foreign owners; and the family-law side of these files sits with our family law practice.
