Do you need a lawyer for an Italian property purchase or property sale?
Q: Do you need a lawyer to purchase or sell real estate in Italy? Isn’t the help of a real estate agent or Italian notary sufficient to protect my interests?
A: That’s the million-dollar question, when you buy or sell an Italian property. It’s the question we see asked repeatedly online, in many groups, in multiple chats, in every place non-Italians congregate to share advice with each other about how to navigate a real estate market that is foreign to them.
Here are three objective facts from which you can get the answer to the question above:
- Experienced and skilled real estate lawyers will use one specific template to prepare a property purchase offer, if they represent a buyer, and a substantially different template if they represent the seller. Italian civil law establishes a large number of default rules, rights, and obligations on the buyer and the seller. However, the parties can personalize the transaction terms to dramatically increase the buyer’s protection or reduce the seller’s liability, way beyond the standard terms set out by the law. Agents and notaries, on the other hand, will use the same template, which they will adapt to the case circumstances, of course. But from their perspective, the transaction will be a contract “to buy & sell”. From a lawyer’s mindset, it is either a contract “to buy” or a contract “to sell”, not both.
- In a purely Italian domestic property transaction, where both buyer and seller are Italians, often neither the buyer nor the seller perceives the value of spending money for independent legal advice from a lawyer. But if you have your own (experienced and skilled) real estate lawyer assisting you, you have the upper hand in a transaction where the other party is not assisted by a legal expert.
- As the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. For example, in Italy there is no legal obligation for the seller to provide a “Seller’s Disclosure Statement” (SDS), nor do buyers expect one. The lack of SDS does not provide transparency to buyers and leaves remarkable liability on sellers. A truly experienced and skilled property lawyer will advise his/her buying client about the necessary information to look for and will also assist gathering and checking such information. Correspondingly, a lawyer will assist his/her selling client to prepare a thorough SDS to be acknowledged by the buyer – to limit seller’s liability – prior to accepting the purchase offer.
At our law firm, we have a department of lawyers who work primarily on property purchases and one with lawyers who work primarily on property sales. Between the two departments, some of the templates, clauses, processes, and strategies are radically different. Having an expert on your side can be the difference between making a dream come true and struggling with a costly nightmare.
If you wish to go it alone, here are some tips:
Tips to buy an Italian property.
Tips to sell an Italian property.
Tab 2 content.
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