• A person for whom it is not the first project
• A person who has a valid building permit
• A person who is building on his/her own property
• A person whose land or building isn’t mortgaged
• A person who is solvent
• A person who doesn’t conceal the financial situation of his/her company
• A person who is supported by a reliable bank
• A person who wasn’t involved in scandals or court casesa
• A person who doesn’t have problems with subcontractors and pays them on time
• A person who doesn’t have tax debts
• A person who is ready to give a bank guarantee when paying in cash
• A person who doesn’t give unrealistically high discounts on paying in advance (10% at most)
• A person for whom you have a recommendation from more than one ex-buyer
• A person who is willing to offer a storied flat which isn’t burdened
• A person who finishes buildings in agreed time frame
• A person who on payment gives title deed suitable for registration
• A person who on transfer gives the land registry plot with no financial burdens
• A person whose name and surname, company residence and fixed phone line you know

Dear Clients,

In the following text, in order to make your real-estate buying or selling easier, we have answered some of the questions mostly asked by you, and we have given some advice which we consider to be useful for a successful business. If you haven’t found answers to any of your queries or you need any advice or legal opinion when buying or selling a real-estate, feel free to contact us by mail or directly by phone.

1. How to form a price and sell the real-estate quickly?
2. What can our company do for you?
3. What is land?
4. What is land register?
5. What are the main commitments of the contracting parties?
6. When do you acquire the ownership rights?
7. What is clausula intabulandi?
8. Possessing... it isn’t the same as owning.
9. Taxes when buying real-estate.
10. Taxes when exchanging real-estate.
11. When are tax payments on real-estate due in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
12. What is a down payment?
13. Is it possible to enter a contract of real-estate selling or buying abroad?
14. Can foreign citizens buy real-estate in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
15. Can foreign citizens sell real-estate in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

The first condition to a successful sale is determining (market) price. Do not underestimate your real-estate, because the money you get by selling it will not enable you to buy what you intended to, and therefore, you will not be satisfied with that sale. Also, do not overestimate it either. It will take a long time to sell it, and when do you sell it in the end, it will be for a lot less, i.e. real (market) price.

The sellers often set the price according to the prices from the neighbourhoods or according to how real-estate is being sold in the same area of the city. When forming prices you must not forget that the seller’s house was built 35 years ago, while the next-door house was built 5 years ago. The latter one also has an enormous garden, excellently placed rooms, better position, new facade, pool, tidied surroundings, and was built of top quality materials.

In short, the-next door house has everything which the sellers has does not, and for these reasons the prices of the two cannot be identical. The two houses cannot be sold at the same price regardless of the fact that they are both positioned in the same area.

It is desirable that the seller estimates the worth of the real-estate with more precision before advertising it, individually determining all the mentioned issues (location, age, building quality, room placement…) because it is the only way to make sure you have a successful sale. The selling of real-estate at the realistic (market) price, with the help of our company should not take 3 years, but really just a few months, because we present the real-estate in the best possible way and we really play a huge roll in quick realization. On the other hand, we cannot influence a buyer who needs to pay an amount of money which the seller would like to have (unrealistically) for the real-estate.

If the seller comes up with the price on the basis of the following logic: “I am selling a house the size of which is 220 m² at the price of 380.000,00 KM, because I have a 100.000,00 KM loan which I have to pay off, and I should very much like to buy my daughter a flat for 50.000,00 KM, my wife and I need 100.000,00 more to buy a flat for ourselves, and I also wish to have some 130.000,00 KM left. So I will write the price of 380.000,00 KM, but then I will drop the price to 210.000,00 KM when the real buyer comes because it just wouldn’t work the other way.”

That most certainly is not a good way, because right at the beginning a potential customer is being rejected. A serious customer expects a serious price over which he can bargain a bit with the seller, but he doesn’t imagine the seller lowering the price 30% or more. A seller such as the one mentioned here would never get a chance to be contacted by a serious buyer. After a few months, our seller from the first part of this story, who had set the unrealistic price, will go to phase two of his “selling tactics”: “Nobody has called me yet, so I will drop the price for 50.000,00 KM, and if I receive no calls after that, I will drop it even further.”...

It is wise to consult an expert before forming the price of your real-estate, if you want to shorten the whole procedure of selling.

On the other hand, there are also buyers who would like to buy your real-estate at their own desired but unrealistic price, which the seller should of course refuse. Just as some sellers overestimate the worth of their real-estate, it is the same for some buyers who overestimate the worth of the money they are investing. Such buyers try to buy real-estate at a price which is, speaking impartially, too low for the wanted real-estate (“It has to be the most beautiful one, best located, of perfect quality, if possible in the city centre with a pool, because that is what he/she has always wanted” for 100.000,00 KM but only so that he/she is left with enough for a new car.) Here, we are talking about not serious sellers who spend years “selling” and not serious buyers who spend years “buying”.

The love of the seller towards his/her real-estate cannot be included into the price, nor can the amount of money the seller needs to solve his financial problems. The same goes for the buyer – the price cannot be formed based on what the buyer has so far saved. Such buyers and sellers cannot be helped by any advertisement. Another group of buyers/seller, the ones who negotiate realistic prices can achieve their goals.

Luckily, there is this “other group”. The serious sellers set realistic prices, but in their short advertisement comprised of five words they have badly presented their real-estate and are therefore unsuccessful. The serious buyers, who plan to buy at realistic prices, cannot find the real-estate they want in that five-word ad. Our company can and wants to bring together such buyers and sellers, and we are in the market for them.

The reasons for selling can be secret, but the real-estate should be presented publicly. Maybe the true buyer is your first-door neighbour, or someone who is just now visiting our pages in Sarajevo, Vienna or Zagreb. We are an excellent choice for all the buyers and sellers from the “other group”.

You must be wondering:

• Why should anyone hire this company to assist when buying real-estate?
• What can it offer us?
• What are its duties to us?
• Why not go around them and avoid paying the commission fee?

People who have taken part in buying or selling real-estate are more or less familiar with tha fact that companies such as ours “link” buyers and sellers and take an active role in negotiating the price, terms of selling and ownership issues, payments, as well as other details such as rent expenses, terms of purchase, transfer or the existing phone line, etc.

What are the duties of our company regarding the legal services?

The first and our primary responsibility is to check the land registry status of the real-estate on the day of signing a purchase and sale contract or a down payment contract. Both the buyer and the seller must be informed about everything that the authorised person (lawyer or legal adviser) finds out about the land registry status of a real-estate.

The legal status should be pointed out to the parties.

Contracts, certificates and all the other documents to be signed should be shown to the parties beforehand, enabling them to have enough time to read the documents and ask any question. In case of any dispute between the parties during the transfer of the land, ownership and alike, the company must put all its efforts and experience to resolve the dispute to everyone’s satisfaction, barring in mind the interests of both parties. All the possibilities should be exhausted before referring the parties to resolve their dispute in a court of law. They are particularly reminded of how long and expensive court cases can be.

In practice, it has proved that buying real-estate without hiring a company is the most expensive way of doing so, most often because of being unable of a timely check upon the land registry status.

Anyhow, the company is required to submit the purchase and sale contract for registration (municipal land-registry) and to complete the tax return for the transferred real-estate.

In conformity with the Code of Ethics and Practice of Realtors in dealing pledge themselves to protect and promote the interests of parties and should not take advantage of a party being uninformed or unskilled in order to achieve a price which is not in accord with the market prices. Moreover, the company is obliged to secrecy about the information the parties confide in them.

All in all, it has to be admitted that companies are the ones who mostly do find a desired for us.

Land is part of earth surface which is marked by a singular number in the cadastre and the name of the cadastral municipality in which it is located (cadastre plot). Anything that is permanently connected to the land, on the surface or beneath it, is the integral part of the land and shares its legal destiny (unless it is said otherwise by the law).

Land registries are public identifications, held by municipal courts, which anyone can ask to look at or ask for an excerpt or a copy. They are trusted and have the strength of public identifications. The proprietor who has in good faith submitted the contract for registration in the land registry is protected by law, if he did not know nor had any reason to doubt that what was registered is not complete or is different than the unregistered status.

The contracting parties (buyer or seller) determine their rights and duties in the purchase and sale (pre)contract. The main duties come down to the responsibility of buyer to pay the seller the agreed amount of money and for the seller to, after he has received the money, allow the buyer to take over the property and makes it possible to register the ownership.

It is important to mention that the parties put in the contract all their legal interests, as all that is not stated in writing as a part of the contract does not have any validity.

The seller or a person he/she authorises notarizes the contract at a public notary.

It is important to mention that the buyer does not acquire ownership with the payment, but by registering the ownership in the land registry.

The ownership upon a property is gained by registering of the person, who gained the ownership, into the land register on the basis of the proclaimed will of the earlier owner, oriented to the fact that his property goes to a person who had gained it.

The terms “possession” and “ownership” are two words that mostly confuse clients.

The ownership of the properties acquired on the basis of the legal work is obtained, ended and changed by the registering into land register.

Opposite of that, a possession is “actual control over the property”.

A possession can be: a) legal, or b) illegal

So, a possession isn’t the right, and as such, it is not registered into the land register. It represents an actual control over the property, whose existence and character are stated by the personal insight and especially by the insight into the land registry of the local government. It is obtained by establishing the actual control over the property, and it is lost by delivering the property into the possession of somebody else or leaving it.

For that reason, when buying a property, a buyer should be very careful and check whether all household members or leaseholders or third persons placed in property are agreeable to the agreement between the buyer and salesman about the date, dynamics of the property delivery to the buyer, “free from persons and things”, and first of all, whether they are aware of the fact that the property is being sold. For the buyer it’s not the solution to get the ownership of the property by registering it into the land register, only to find out that, for example, the owner and the leaseholder or someone of the household members is participating in the ownership litigation about the mentioned property, or the litigation because of the compensation required by the leaseholder from the leaser because of the same extra investments into the property. In both these hypothetical cases the buyer wouldn’t be able to enjoy peacefully the possession of the property.

To conclude, the future buyers of any kind of property should obligatorily check the land registers and who the real owner of the property they buy is.

In Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina there is the unique tax rate of 5% for all kinds of and all kinds of transactions. T he tax level is determined by the price from the sale contract and the estimate of the tax office on whose land the is located.

According to law, the property-transaction tax is paid by the buyer or the seller in his name, if they should agree so.

In the case of exchanging , the tax is paid by the party which gains the ownership of more valuable property and for that difference in value pay 5% for the same property.

After signing the contract, the buyer is obliged to inform the tax office within 30 days after the contract has been notarized at the Notary. The buyer is also obliged to pay the tax in 15 days from the day a formal decision has been reached by the tax office. If he doesn’t pay it on time, the tax office charges daily interest.

A down payment is an amount of money, from about 10% of purchase/sale value, and it is paid as assign of a seriousness of the business and the real intention in buying the real-estate.

Yes, and it is best to make it in an embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

If it is made and verified at the notary, it is necessary to translate it to our language by the court interpreter.

Yes, but under the following conditions

In order to gain a , a foreign citizen must first ask for and get consent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which before reaching the decision, asks for the opinion of the Ministry of Justice.

The approval is given if there is reciprocity, that is if Bosnian citizens can buy in the country of the person who is asking for the approval.

The procedure is as follows: when they decide to buy a certain property, they sign a purchase and sale contract with the seller, and then it is verified by the notary (a salesman has to verify his signature and it is good if the buyer does the same). All this, together with the verified copy of the buyer’s passport and other needed documents should be delivered to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

While waiting for the approval, we suggest they, based on the purchase and sale contract, register the ownership’s right in the land register in order to protect their rights and interests.

The foreign citizens who have a company in Bosnia and Herzegovina do not need the consent.

Yes, they can. All foreign natural and legal persons can sell their located in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the moment, the only exceptions are legal persons from the former Yugoslav countries. This issue will be resolved within the negotiation process about the succession of SFRY, i.e. the war reparations.