Take independent advice on Italian Property Law!

In Italy, all the searches and paperwork required to buy and sell a house are undertaken by the estate agent and the notary. The notary acts on behalf of the Government and their fees are set in stone, on a sliding scale according to the price of the property. Their prime concern is registering the sale, ensuring that the conveyancing is taken care of according to Italian Property Law and collecting the relevant taxes on behalf of the Government. They are completely neutral. Notaries do NOT act on behalf of either the buyer or the seller. Likewise, the estate agent is being paid the same amount from both buyer and seller and their only interest is to see the sale go through.

So though no one is acting against you, no one is acting on your behalf either. It is completely normal for Italians to buy and sell houses without the involvement of a lawyer or solicitor. I have worked in an estate agency for two years and have yet to see a solicitor or a lawyer involved in a single sale.

HOWEVER, you are not Italian, you probably don’t speak Italian perfectly and you are in a particularly vulnerable position. The German estate agent I mentioned earlier who defrauded many clients was only able to do so because of the collusion of his notary. The notary has since been struck off, but that is no consolation to the many people who fell foul of this dynamic duo before the police caught up with them. So it is in your interest to have your own legal representation.

Italian planning regulations vary enormously from one region to the next. For this reason, you are much better off hiring a solicitor who practices in the area you are going to buy in, and then finding an interpreter to translate your correspondence, rather than hiring either UK solicitors with Italian expertise or even Anglo-Italian solicitors based elsewhere in Italy.

A solicitor who is used to organising the sale and purchase of apartments in uptown Milan will not have a clue about planning regulations in a mountain area. This may be subject to landslides, with regulations limiting what kind of building can be erected; where water rights have never been written down but simply passed on generation to generation by word of mouth etc. And it will cost you a fortune for every extra minute they spend trying to find all this out.

You simply need a solicitor who knows the area well to advise you should any aspect of the sale be a cause for concern, and who can check that the paperwork the estate agent and the notary have prepared is in order, that all the correct searches have been done and that the person you are paying for the property is the legal owner.