On a house at six hundred thousand euro the deposit comes to around ten per cent, payable on signature of the preliminary contract, which is precisely the moment at which the checks it would have been sensible to run beforehand become your problem. Running them in advance would have cost a fraction of that sum and taken three weeks.
The five below are the ones I see skipped most often, set out in ascending order of seriousness, because while the first two can be resolved one way or another, for the remaining three money is not the relevant variable.
1. The building’s lawful planning status
Lawful planning status is the documentary reconstruction of a building’s planning history, meaning the consent that authorised its construction together with every later consent that altered it, and it cannot be substituted either by the fact that the house has stood for thirty years or by a declaration from the seller, however honestly given. [1]
The Salva Casa decree has made that proof less demanding than it used to be, since retrospective consents, fines paid in place of demolition and construction tolerances all now count towards lawful status, provided the corresponding penalties have been paid, while for buildings dating from a period when no consent was required at all, evidence pointing to one may be enough. [1] Tolerances are the permitted margins of divergence between the approved drawings and the building as it stands, which do not amount to a planning breach; for works completed by 24 May 2024 they run from six per cent up to sixty square metres down to two per cent above five hundred, [2] which means that in a flat of eighty square metres a discrepancy of four metres is not an unlawful work.
There is one limit on which most of the misunderstandings rest, and it is that tolerances operate only where a lawful consent exists behind them, so they never make regular what was built without any consent whatsoever.
2. Conformity with the cadastral record
The deed of sale must set out the property’s cadastral identifiers, refer to the floor plans on file and contain the seller’s declaration that the physical state of the property matches those records, failing which the deed is void, [3] and void here carries its full meaning: a sale lacking those elements produces no legal effect at all.
In practice the difficulty is not the declaration, which the seller makes in any event, but the fact that it frequently does not correspond to reality without anyone noticing, at least until the bank’s surveyor arrives to carry out the valuation, or until you try to sell the place on some years later; and the discrepancies in question — a wall moved, a bathroom carved out of a veranda, a mezzanine put in where none was approved — are invisible if you simply walk through the rooms, and become apparent only when you set the rooms against the plan held at the cadastre.
3. Landscape protection and the coastal strip
With landscape protection you leave the territory of what can be put right by paying for it. Coastal land within three hundred metres of the shoreline is protected by statute, and because the distance is measured as a horizontal projection a villa built on a headland falls within it even when it stands fifty metres above the sea, [4] while in Sardinia the national protection is compounded by the Regional Landscape Plan, which across the undeveloped parts of the coastal strip rules out any development at all beyond a closed list of exceptions. [5]
The consequence that matters to a buyer lies in article 167 of the Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code, under which anyone who has carried out works in a protected area without landscape consent may apply for retrospective approval only on condition that no usable floor space or volume was created, [6] so that in the opposite case there is no route to regularisation at all, however much one may be prepared to spend or to wait.
The works that fall into this category are perfectly ordinary ones, from an enclosed veranda to a roofed terrace to a plant room for the swimming pool, and they are also the works that make a house by the sea desirable, which is why they appear without fail in the photographs attached to the listing.
4. Collective land rights
Collective land rights, known in Italy as usi civici, are the check missing from almost every list in circulation, and in Sardinia they are anything but marginal. Land subject to them appears in a general inventory maintained by the regional agriculture department, [7] and the restriction attaches to the legal status of the land rather than to its appearance, with the result that it survives even in areas that have already been built on, and stays with the land even where the collective right itself is bought out. [8]
Since land carrying a collective right cannot be freely sold, you may find yourself looking at a plot with a house standing on it, a seller acting in complete good faith and a chain of notarial deeds that appears entirely in order, while the restriction has remained exactly where it was for the simple reason that nobody in any of the earlier transactions took the trouble to check.
5. Where the seller’s title came from
The last check concerns who the seller bought from, and on what basis. If the property was inherited, it needs to be established that the succession was properly declared and registered and that no forced heirs were left out, since a forced-heirship claim can be brought against the purchase within periods running from the date of death; and if a gift appears anywhere in the chain of title, allow for it early, because many banks will not lend against property that came by way of gift, and the point tends to surface once the mortgage application is already under way.
How this works in practice
The mistake I see recurring is not so much skipping the checks as running them in the wrong order, because the irrevocable offer gets signed on the strength of an agency reporting another interested party, the deposit is paid when the preliminary contract is signed, and the surveyor appears three weeks before completion, by which point the only alternative to going through with the purchase is litigation to recover the sixty thousand euro.
The first two checks are carried out by a qualified professional, a surveyor or an architect, cross-referencing the municipal planning archive with the cadastre, while the third and fourth call for the mapping of the Regional Landscape Plan and the inventory of land subject to collective rights, neither of which is exhaustive on its own; the last is done through the property registers.
None of this is tax advice and none of it is carried out by this firm. When a foreign client arrives with an offer already signed, what I can do is explain what remains recoverable, and that is appreciably less useful than what could have been done three weeks earlier.
The checklist
If you have already signed an offer, the question is no longer which checks to run but how much room you have left, and the answer depends on how the offer is worded, on what the seller declared and on how much time has passed. Send me what you signed and I will tell you which of the two situations you are in.
Sources
[1] Article 9-bis(1-bis) and (1-ter) of Presidential Decree 380 of 6 June 2001, as amended by Decree-Law 69 of 29 May 2024, converted into Law 105 of 24 July 2024 (the Salva Casa decree). On the relationship between amnestied works and lawful status, Council of State, sixth chamber, 9 April 2026 no. 2848.
[2] Article 34-bis of Presidential Decree 380/2001, for works completed by 24 May 2024.
[3] Article 29(1-bis) of Law 52 of 27 February 1985, introduced by Article 19(14) of Decree-Law 78 of 31 May 2010.
[4] Article 142(1)(a) of Legislative Decree 42 of 22 January 2004.
[5] Articles 19 and 20 of the implementing rules of the Regional Landscape Plan of Sardinia.
[6] Article 167(4) and (5) of Legislative Decree 42/2004.
[7] General inventory of land subject to collective rights, Article 7 of Sardinian Regional Law 12 of 14 March 1994; Article 22 of the implementing rules of the Regional Landscape Plan.
[8] Law 168 of 20 November 2017 on collective ownership.
Agostino Galizia is a chartered accountant and statutory auditor in Cagliari, Sardinia, and a partner of Galizia & Pinna Associati. He is registered with the Ordine dei Dottori Commercialisti ed Esperti Contabili di Cagliari (no. 1330/A) and with the Italian register of statutory auditors (no. 80487).
This article contains general information on Italian law as it stands at the date of publication. It is not advice on any particular case and should not be relied on as such.
