Restarting a stalled build in Montenegro follows a fixed order: fix the evidence of what is actually built, audit it against the revised main design, deal with the contract before the contractor's successor touches anything, check which permit clock is running, and only then bring in a licensed contractor and supervising engineer. The single most valuable document is the supervising engineer's record — and it is the one owners most often never had.
The site looks the same in every one of these files: a concrete frame, a rusting crane hire sign, a padlocked gate above Budva or Bar. What differs is the paperwork, and that is what decides whether the project is a six-month problem or a three-year one. Some owners ran out of money mid-build. Some had a contractor who left after taking a stage payment. Some inherited a half-built shell with the purchase and only discovered afterwards that the design and the concrete do not match.
This page is the restart protocol I actually work through, in order. Skipping steps here is expensive, because every later step depends on evidence that gets harder to reconstruct as the site sits.
| Step | What it produces | Why it comes in this position |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Fix the state of the site | Geodetic survey, dated photographs, materials inventory, advance-payment reconciliation | Evidence decays; a stalled site changes and nobody can later prove what your money built |
| 2. Deviation audit | Built condition compared against the revised main design | A deviation found now is a design amendment; found at technical inspection it is a stopped handover |
| 3. Contract position | Termination or variation, penalty analysis, retention, subcontractor claims | Article 280(5) can extinguish a penalty claim the moment you accept work without reserving |
| 4. Permit clocks | Which of Article 35 or Article 43 applies | Determines whether you finish under this permit or file a fresh application |
| 5. New contractor and supervision | Licensed contractor, supervising engineer appointed by and paid by the investor | Without supervision records the technical inspection has nothing to read |
| 6. Close-out | Technical inspection, use permit, cadastre registration, final handover | Article 60 keeps the building unusable until the use permit issues |
Step 1 and 2: prove what is built before you touch it
Before a new contractor sets foot on the site, commission a geodetic survey and a photographic record with dates. This is not bureaucracy: once new work starts, the boundary between what the previous contractor delivered and what the new one did becomes unprovable, and with it any claim against the first one. Add the materials on site, the delivery notes, and a reconciliation of every advance paid against work in place.
Then run the deviation audit: what stands against what the revised main design says should stand. In the files I see, deviations cluster in the same places — a terrace enlarged, a floor level raised, an extra volume that "the previous owner just added". Under the legalisation statute, when a permit exists but the permitted area has been exceeded, only the excess counts as unpermitted (Article 2(2) of the Law on Legalisation). That is good news for the structure as a whole and a problem you still have to solve, because a building that deviates from the approved design does not pass technical inspection.
Step 3: the contract, before anyone new starts work
Two provisions of the Law on Obligations decide most contractor disputes here, and both cut against the owner who moves too fast.
Article 279(2): a contractual penalty falls away where the delay results from a circumstance for which the contractor is not responsible. In practice, employer-caused delay — late decisions, unpaid stages, a design change — is the defence every departing contractor raises, and the file either rebuts it with dated correspondence or it does not.
Article 280(5): a client who has accepted the works and has not immediately reserved the right to the penalty cannot claim it. One sentence of reservation in the handover record preserves a claim that has been accruing for months; its absence deletes it. I ask for the handover documents before I ask anything else.
Against that, the ten-year liability of Article 712 works in your favour and cannot be contracted away: the contractor answers for defects in the solidity of the building, including those originating in the ground, for ten years from delivery and acceptance, and the designer answers where the defect comes from the design. It runs in favour of later acquirers too, which matters when you eventually sell. The catch is the notice regime of Article 713 — six months from discovery to notify, then one year to bring the claim — and Article 715 gives a short two-month window for recourse notice against a subcontractor. Slow files lose good claims here.
Step 4: which permit clock is running
Article 35 gives two years from issue to start works, with no extension mechanism I could find in the consolidated text; Article 43 gives five years to complete, and exceeding it does not void the permit but triggers a charge for each year begun, calculated on the value estimated in the revised design, plus a duty to secure the site. A stalled site that started on time is inside the second regime — a budgeting problem. A site that never started within two years is a permitting problem and goes back to the beginning. The detail, including how older permits are treated under the transitional Articles 159 and 159a, is on the page about an expired or lapsed building permit.
While the site is stalled, the securing obligation is not decorative. An open, unsecured structure is both an inspection target and a liability if someone is injured on it.
Step 5: bringing in the replacement team
Two appointments matter and they are separate. The contractor must hold a licence for execution, granted by the ministry by decision within 15 days of a complete application; firms holding revision or supervision licences must employ at least one licensed reviewer per design discipline (Pravilnik o licencama, Sl. list CG 42/2025; Chamber of Engineers, checked 2 September 2026). A qualified engineer is one with a VII1-level degree or a recognised foreign diploma, three years of practice and a clean record.
The supervising engineer (stručni nadzor) is the investor's appointment and the investor's cost — not the contractor's. This is the point foreign owners resist most and regret most. Supervision is the only party on site whose reports document, in your interest, what was actually built, and those reports are what the technical inspection commission reads at the end. A restart without supervision recreates exactly the evidence gap that made the first collapse so expensive.
When negotiating with the replacement contractor, price the takeover risk explicitly. A contractor who finishes someone else's structure will not accept liability for what is underneath it, and should not be asked to. Define the interface in the contract: surveyed state at takeover, defects excluded, works included, retention, and a payment schedule tied to verified progress rather than the calendar.
What a stalled site costs while it waits
Owners tend to treat a paused site as a paused cost. It is not. The securing obligation under Article 43 runs alongside the annual charge for each year begun beyond completion, so the meter is running on the permit side. On the asset side, an unfinished structure is not registered as completed, which means it cannot be mortgaged in the ordinary way and cannot be let. And if it turns out the structure has no valid permit behind it at all, the annual space-use charge of the legalisation law applies — 0.5 to 2.0 per cent per square metre of net area where the survey has been filed, 1 to 3 per cent of gross area where it has not, calculated on the statistics office's average construction price for new dwellings in the previous year. With the 2025 coastal figure of €2,081 per square metre, the lower band alone runs to something in the order of ten to forty euros per square metre per year.
Set against that, the cost of the first two steps in this protocol — a survey, a photographic record, a deviation audit — is small and it is spent once. In every file where owners hesitated on that spending, the hesitation cost more than the survey would have, because the evidence they needed a year later no longer existed.
There is also a quieter cost that does not appear in any statute: the longer a project sits, the fewer contractors want it. Taking over a half-built structure means inheriting invisible work, and good firms price that risk or decline it. A file with a clean survey, a current deviation audit and an intact permit is a project a serious contractor can quote on; a padlocked site with a box of receipts is not.
Step 6: close-out, and the two documents that unlock the asset
The end of the chain is technical inspection followed by the use permit: the application goes in within 7 days of the final report and the permit issues within 7 days of the inspection. Article 60 prohibits use of the building before it. Then comes cadastre registration, and only a registered building sells, mortgages or lets normally. Investor and contractor make the final handover and settlement within 60 days of obtaining the use permit unless the contract says otherwise — and starting to use the building before handover counts as handover, which is a trap in itself for owners who move in early.
If the structure turns out to have been built without any permit rather than with a stalled one, the statute changes entirely: the legalisation law applies, the July 2025 orthophoto decides what can be registered, and Article 33 prohibits disposal of an unpermitted building. That route is set out in the legalizacija deadline checklist. If the dispute with the original contractor is heading to a forum, the choice between court and arbitration is discussed in arbitration or court for a Montenegrin property contract, and the damages framework in the basics of a damages claim.
Send me the permit, the revised main design, the construction contract with its annexes, the payment record and photographs of the current state through the construction and project advisory page. Within 3 working days you get a written restart read: which permit clock applies, where the built state departs from the design, what the contract still supports as a claim, and what the site needs before a new contractor starts — no promise of outcome, because the outcome depends on the evidence that survived.