BUYING A PROPERTY IN ITALY: Italian Lawyer's Advice on Real Estate & Home Renovations

[Music] generally as a filmmaker my objective is to inspire you but i don't want to just share stories of my dream i want to help you achieve yours [Music] so i invited italian lawyer michele kapeki into our garden for a chat about everything one needs to know to make buying a home in italy more than just a dream uh michaela here we are again thank you for coming back uh i know everyone was overjoyed at all the knowledge and advice that you shared uh last time and uh this is probably one of the most exciting topics when it comes to uh legalities initially because it's the dream buying buying a house buying a property in italy is becoming has been always an incredible dream for a lot of people the the ultimate dream so when um an individual or a couple uh come to you what's the first thing to consider as a foreigner with a dream i drive a few common questions that they come they already come to me sometimes after having done some research but they need to have a more clear idea of of the things that they need to know well the first question is if i buy property in italy do i have to pay my taxes to the italian government and the answer is no right you don't pay taxes to the italian government because uh you own a property in italy you pay the property taxes of course if the house that you buy in italy is not the house where you're living if it's a house a holiday house but other than that there is no other requirement in terms of uh from a point of view taxation and property taxes generally speaking are just a fraction of what a lot of foreigners are used to to pay for their properties in their home country the property taxes for when you buy a property can change dramatically if you're planning to move to italy and establish your domicile in italy so become a resident in italy because in that case that property can be purchased not as a holiday house but as your primary your first property that the the primary residence exactly thank you i mean if that's the case the taxation is extremely uh lower than the taxation you pay for for for um a secondary home secondary hope for a holiday house there are different kind of parameters but we're talking about a fraction like 30 of the taxes that you would pay if you are buying compared to the tax you pay if you buy a holiday house the other big second big question is can i buy a property if i don't take residency if i'm not establishing my residency can i buy my property from abroad the other answer the answer is absolutely yes what we do unless there are some restrictions sometimes depending on the country of origin of these people but 99 of the time if they are buying a property with the intention of either to live in the property or to use it as a holiday house there is no specific requirement if they cannot be here the proper the the purchase can be completed using legal proxy we very often represent foreigners that sell property sometimes not even in person just on through like a virtual tour of a property and they appoint us to through a notary power of attorney to represent them in the sale and then in the purchase and then they arrive we bring them around the property and they see the property in person sometimes for the first time but generally speaking yes these are the most common questions so they can come as a tourist the only big thing this is an important aspect to taking consideration a lot of people think if i buy a property in italy do i get automatically a permit to stay to stay in italy and the answer to this question is no and either we don't have a permit to save for owners of a real estate property this is a big misconception based on the fact that some other european union countries do have some program where if you buy a property you can automatically obtain a permit to say italy is not one of those having a property owning a property is the process of obtaining a visa if you want to stay here for more than three months as you can do as a tourist most of the time because by showing that you have asset you already have a property you basically are showing that you don't need to rent a place which means that you have sufficient economic resource to live abroad abroad without becoming a burden for the economy of a country so um can you come as a tourist to buy yes does owning the property in italy make you eligible to have a real a permit to stay not really kenny's but it can ease the process i see so i don't know if you've seen uh that very famous film under the tuscan sun with diane lane and and it's that that moment that i think has captured the imagination and hearts of many many a telephile she's on the bus she gets off and within it seems uh a matter of hours uh she's she's bought it properly and she i don't think she even returns to the states which is perhaps a little bit of a fictional aspect this is definitely a fictional aspect because you if you enter as a tourist it is another big thing if you enter as a tourist unless there are one of the few except exceptions related to family permit to stay and visas like you can extend your sales tourists unless there is an emergency basically that definitely what happened in the movie is a little bit fictional but the the the basic thing is uh a tourist who falls in love we had a few clients actually who arrived here uh they were just doing the tour they're so beautiful property like uh that's like what what's who's the owner of their property like well likely we we got to knew to know who was the owner of the property and in a couple of months they bought the property it's not impossible in in theory let's say that statistically speaking it's not that common to find a property that is ready to be sold unless it's maybe just restored by by the seller because tuscany especially especially tuscany is a is a land with a lot of historical buildings i i think again going back to that film which i love i don't want to criticize it but completely but but uh there's a scene in under the tuscan sun where they're just completely demolishing a whole wall and it makes me laugh because i think well either they she was just hiring these people illegally and nero and and not asking for any permission because to to for example demolish a wall even inside where no one from the outside can see uh you need a permit i guess our hope is that uh people watching this are not calling you michele [Laughter] i'm turning down the wall right now as we speak can i do that no hopefully but it's it's another important aspect related to the fact that the regulation is on not only about what you do but also who is doing those kind of works so it's always very recommendable to be sure that the company or the whoever is going to do those kind of works has is a wealth structure as as a company can be like a private company can be like a more established company but with all the permission or authorizations with properties with houses that uh like where people lived for centuries and over centuries people did a lot of works inside their properties and not all the time they reported these works to the proper authorities so a lot of time it happens that you see a beautiful property then you start looking at the maps that are available in the land registries and you see that what you see is not what is how it looks in in the cadastral maps of of the comuni of the municipality and we need to resolve these discrepancies sometimes it's possible sometimes there are big things like construction of an entire new unit of a property that didn't exist originally that because of zoning because of restriction of the fine art is not possible to have so the buyer must be informed and that's part of a job regarding what can be fixed what cannot be fixed what must be turned down sometime and rebuilt from scratch so these are all things that sometimes we need to to to work on for for a few months in order to be ready for the transfer of the property in your experience how long does does a sale generally take from seeing something online to them handing you over the keys more or less we take in consideration that by the time that we approach the seller that can happen if you know the seller directly you can place a phone call you have you set up a meeting at our office we do it often if the real estate real estate agent that represent the seller you cannot generally can get in touch directly with with the seller you have to use the service of the realtor that is representing the seller and we consider a week to get to know the owner or get to know the the document regarding the property that is on sale we consider another two weeks more or less to have proper documentation coming from the cadastral archives having more or less other analysis we consider like two three weeks is the minimum to have if the property is completely in order it doesn't need to have any um amendment any fix that need to be done through the land registries if we need to resolve issues before the transaction is over it can take three four months also that that's relatively quick again the the element that can make the process longer is related to the bureaucracy so if we are if there is a problem related to a fazad a window that is expected not to be there or a wall that was closed it wasn't expected to be closed these are things where you have to ask permissions permission or authorizations to keep the wall where it is or to keep the window when it is possible you can also complete the operation the transfer of the property without that permission but the buyer at that point is buying a property with the flaw with with the problem that we advise let's wait a little longer let's be sure that the community the municipality will give you the permission to keep the window where it is otherwise you might risk that you have to close the window sometimes we have clients i don't care even if we have to close the window i'll keep the property i love it so much so obviously the time gets shorter if we have to wait until the end of the permission to be granted it can be also six months sometime but more or less in the worst scenario is with six seven months we have the the transaction completed can can you please take us through who are the professionals that one uh should uh higher uh for this whole process because uh let's say someone begins with a real estate agent where do you go from there there is a a big big caveat a big information that is important to know real estate agency real estate activity is a regulated activity in italy meaning that not everyone can start selling properties you need to have a permission authorization to be a realtor so it's important that the person who is you're going to hire to help you with the purchase of a property is a person that is entitled to do so an entitlement pass through an exam that must be taken the realtor must be an authorized realtor the second subject that is uh absolutely especially if you're dealing with an international uh real estate transaction if you're coming from abroad is a legal representative not because it's meant that you to have a lawyer to have a legal representative or someone who has a knowledge about the real estate regulations um but is very advisable it's very advisable because even the most the savviest person even people coming from the real estate market abroad they will they will be overwhelmed by the amount of information about the regulation fine art regulations a lot of things that can make a dream really become a nightmare if you don't have someone explaining to you the consequence of the property that you're buying or what you can do what you cannot do and sometimes these are kind of information that kind of questions that a buyer don't ask because they don't even think about that so you need to be proactive and tell to your client i know you're coming here for setting up a bit in breakfast you need to be prepared to know that some buildings some properties some units are not allowed to host breakfast activities or i know you want to do a studio where you can teach pilates or other kind of things you know that you cannot do business activities in that property so there are certain kind of things that is important to be there proactively give this kind of information to a prospective buyer the other person that is a other professional is absolutely in necessary this transaction is the notary the public notary is a civil law public notary is very different from the notary that is used in a common law system in america or in the uk it's not just a person that notarizes your signature is a public officer appointed by the government something between a lawyer and a judge that is the person that will make the transaction completed and will be responsible for the registration of the deed with all the public authorities the public notary is the person that collects the taxes on behalf of the government they will pay those um those money to the government so is a person that is really there to to be at the third neutral to be sure that the transaction complies with all the real estate regulations and nothing and the transaction is actually completed in the most appropriate and legal way possible then depending on the kind of property you're buying if you're buying an old property that need to be restored you will need to have a team of people that will help you with all the permissions that need to be requested to the government to again uh what do you mean by a team do they have to we have to have to create an army to to make this whole habit yeah no no no but you it's good to have um an architect at least someone that can tell you again if you want to move a window if you want to raise a wall if you want to uh to add extra space maybe you have a nice garden you would like to have an extra room for your guests it's not something you can do by your yourself you need to have permissions even if you are a carpenter if you if you are good at creating things you need to inform the government the local government so the municipality about what you're planning to do um so it's important to have someone who knows how to file those documentation with the proper authorities actually that's something i spoke about with guido in the episode we just i just published last week because with the renovation we're doing uh for the the chicken coop i mean his family have been maintaining these very historic houses for a while but they still need the geomithra the surveyor who is local because she is the one who really can push things through and get things passed so i suppose if someone was saying oh i have a cousin who's italian and he's in in rome so he can help us uh but you i really will at least the way guido explained it to me is that there's an advantage in having someone who is from the area who has all the contacts with that kumuni is essential is essential for the success of the operation again because as guido properly said it it's not obtaining this permission it's not something you can do remotely you need to be there you need to know the regulations because we have national regulation but then we have regional regulation we have local regulations that must be complied with so uh regional scandal that the region of tuscany has specific uh regulation regarding construction how much for instance you can uh improve the growth the size of a property that is different from the regulation used in other regions there are certain kind of incentive for restoring a property in the south of italy or in tuscany in another region that are based on local regulations so it's important to have someone also telling you you know that if you do that if you put the solar panel there you don't have only the incentives of the government but also this incentive from the local rules that you can apply so it's extremely important to have someone who knows also the local regulation it can be there bringing sometime like in paper documentation all the paperworks to the office and sometimes becoming the one that push to be sure that people working in those office are actually speeding up the process for example i have a friend who's doing a swimming pool and literally within the space of two neighborhoods that are uh maybe one kilometer apart in one you can do a pool with a fountain and you can only do blue uh color for the the the pool and just a kilometer away you can only do gray and you can't have a fountain so uh and this and these these little details are things that one wouldn't necessarily assume they think okay we're we're in tuscany i see other another farmhouse of villa has a pool like this but literally if you travel a few kilometers the rules can matter it's a matter of municipality differences they have all very local regulations and that's reason why when i was telling you it's important to have a legal advisor next to you who knows how these kind of things happen take place to ask the proper question is i don't have the knowledge of all the little regulation but i know how to ask the question and to whom asking these kind of questions uh mikhail tell me uh one of the the great advantages of buying in italy is clearly the history you have these properties with with with frescoes with with with these beautiful antique tiles with this uh paviminton cotto you know the terracotta floors and and uh and and there there is so much history uh what happens then uh from a legal perspective uh when you're buying somewhere uh with the fine arts and all of this uh this subject you you you said the proper word fine art regulations many times when you are especially i'm thinking of florence but it could be sienna could be historical cities but even a countryside sometimes you deal with properties where the amount of art the amount of history that there are inside those property must be preserved and the government allows you to buy and to keep in good shape those properties under the condition that you're not completely transforming is the property so a lot of properties are now under a specific they are in they are registered in a registry that provides for fine art regulations properties that means that if that property is inside that registry the owner of the property can only do minimal kind of renovations inside so it's important to know that if you're buying a property that is covered by the fine art regulation or maybe in the countryside you have a property with an amazing landscape you you think about the the little countryside wrote with the cypresses this is something that is the same it's the same view that you can enjoy you could have enjoyed 200 300 years ago didn't change and the government want to preserve that view therefore you cannot do works even outside sometime to transform the the level of enjoyability that you can get from that view so sometimes even external works cannot be done if the property is regulated by the fine art restrictions so there is a rule called um first right refusal basically um that the government has when if you are buying a property that is regulated by the fine art regulation restriction the seller before completing the process in between the process of selling after preliminary offer has been already formalized must inform the government that a sale is about to take place at this given price and the seller must offer to the government the possibility of buying the property because maybe is a property where there is a fresco of leonardo or there is a specific historical reason for that property to go back uh to the government so michele it's a very hot topic that gets people quite excited uh the idea of these one euro homes i'd be very curious to know your opinion what do you think of them are they as good as they seem what's what's the story you need to be careful of course because online you can find a lot of false advertisement a lot of fake news about this kind of thing so there are a lot of scam outside there but there are also very legitimate opportunities given by the fact that the government sometimes local government are actually promoting the restoration the sale of properties that need to be restored sometimes heavily restored and that's the reason why they are offered they are offered at such a good price because there is a commitment on the side of the buyer to go there to establish residency sometime and to invest using local um manpower to get the restoration done of these properties so it's a way to to create circulation of economy because you buy for a little amount of money but then you have to invest local companies to get the restoration completed we need to consider a case by case scenario there are a certain situation where because of the location because of the opportunities that that restoration actually provide can be a very good deal as a situation maybe it's not maybe if you calculate the amount of money that you have to invest in in such a restoration sometimes this property are in the middle of nowhere so you need to know to be aware of where you're buying what is the closest grocery shop what is the closest municipality to where you're living what is the numbers of inhabitants of that village sometimes there are super tiny villages with where very little amount of population these are things that a prospective buyer must be aware of if you are thinking i buy a house for a few euros and then i move in that's not the case because those are properties that sometimes it takes a 90 000 euros for a full renovation when you have to redo the the roof when you have to redo the facade so at that point if you have 70 if you need to budget 70 80 000 euro to to restore from scratch a property that you're paying little but you still need to do that for 70 80 000 euros you can find absolutely gorgeous units also in small maybe some small village 20 30 minutes outside of florence or outside of siena so it depends what your what's the per the purpose of your of your of your property tell me some stories about your clients what what sort of people are buying uh these days uh in tuscany because originally i actually thought before moving to tuscany i thought oh gosh it's it's so popular it's so beloved in all the world uh there mustn't be any properties available here and yet uh now that i live here i realize that there there actually still are obviously there are wonderful regions like le marche umbria that have equally beautiful well let's not let's not make it a competition but all over italy they're incredible also in the north in trentino there's beautiful beautiful properties but um i was surprised that there are still good deals to be had in tuscany even though it's it's so famous it's a market that is where there is a lot of sale a lot of purchase because people changes their need very often you buy a countryside house when you have when you're younger when you have the energy at some point you decide that you need to live in the center because you cannot afford to drive every time you need to go grocery shopping so you sell it we have investors that want to buy big villas to transform in hospitality business and others they want just to have a nice place where they can gather the family from abroad so that during the summer they have their swimming pool their um the view of the hills of tuscany hills now for instance we are dealing with a lot of citizens a lot of americans a lot of foreigners who are trying to recuperate their italian citizenship we are one of the big area of our practice is helping people to recover their italian citizenship and a lot of them want to buy a property where their family was originally coming from so people that came from a tiny little village in the middle of really nowhere in near naples near in calabria in sicilia and they want to go back to the origin of their family so we are all helping them not only to recover their italian citizenship but also to get in touch with their local real estate agency to find a property to buy for buying back where their family was from coming from maybe 150 years ago do you do you tend to find with the couples that they're both quite keen and eager is there usually one who's the dreamer and one who's more pragmatic and and and saying oh honey just wait on you know it's we don't want to get involved in italian bureaucracy or and one is who's saying yes this this is this is it let's generally speaking they already had this kind of fight they already have this kind of argument at home before there is always one of the two and sometimes the husband sometimes the wife sometimes is one of the two partners so that are more uh more pragmatic so it's the one that maybe did some homework or searching online figuring out maybe we have some articles that we publish about this this process so they have done their homework that so we want to know more what about taxation what is like if i buy a house a holiday house what is the taxation to buy a holiday house versus if i move my my my my residency there so some one of the two generally speaking is more more pragmatic the other one is sometimes is the dreamer but i think that it's it's a mix of the two things you can't buy property just because it's a good investment maybe you can do it because a good investment but if you're coming from abroad is because there is something related to your heart your emotions that makes you fall in love with this country how often do you think it's possible to negotiate if someone's looking in there and they and they were saying to their partner ah but you know maybe we can we could they could knock something off that maybe that we could we could negotiate a little on that price do you find that that happens yes yeah it's quite common like it's also very much depend on how the payment is expected to be structured if you're coming with the ability to pay very quickly and therefore the transaction will be closed in two three weeks and sometime it happens obviously the seller could be could be incentivized to say i'm happy to give a little discount on the price given that you're paying everything up front but then okay you get to a point where you've been you've done your homework you're like the property you're willing to make a proposal how does it work the proposal so we by with our proposal we say we are making a binding proposal under the conditions that the property is free from burdens is not under court cases is not uh attacked by creditors by bank so we put numbers of um conditions if our offer is accepted actually together with the offer we generally speaking is requested to give a check so an amount of money like a cashier check to give be given to the lawyer or to the real estate agent to be kept as a deposit to show that you are in good faith and your offer is serious if the property is ready to be bought because at the end of the due diligence that we we run for the client the property can be actually transferred we can go straight to the final agreement final agreement in front of the notary if we have a perception that the property needs restoration renovation permission they need to be requested there is maybe a pending court case that must be completed before the transaction is a is over these are all situations that can make that transaction particularly long in a situation like this both the seller and the buyer want to be sure that the transaction will get to an end so in this case we have an intermediate step that is a preliminary agreement that is different from a proposed original proposal a preliminary agreement is a further step where there is another down payment that is paid we generally speaking suggest to try to register this preliminary agreement with the with the cadastral office to be sure that nobody else can enter in a transaction so if there is another buyer who wants to buy the property cannot do that because the name of the current buyer is registered on the property and it's a public document so it's not possible to do it unless it's done illegally basically at the end of this preliminary transaction there is a registration there is another payment and then we get to the final uh final transaction that is when the property gets transferred to the final to the to the buyer sometimes the preliminary agreement is necessary when the property is covered by the fine art restrictions the one i was telling you before when the government has the option to buy the property so the preliminary agreement is a way to show to the government that you are in in the process of selling or buying the property and it's a preliminary step and we need to wait the 60 days i was telling you before until the government say no we don't want to buy it and then the final transaction takes place so sometime is a very often is a proposal preliminary step final transaction and then champagne your final words of advice uh for people who are embarking on this adventure follow your heart for your heart and come and pursue your dream of having a property in italy is as you said before it's it's a beautiful land uh there is always something to discover and doing it as sometime as a resident but definitely with your own place uh can really make the difference you can be the hub that you're using for then exploring italy and going in different part of italy different part of europe and why not it's beautiful sometimes gives us chills and like to see how people who arrive here with their dream helping them to achieve their dream is is the most rewarding thing that we can do with our job thank you for watching i'll be back next friday with another episode of renovating a ruin

Channel: Kylie Flavell

Views: 576,381

Keywords: Tuscany, villa for sale in Tuscany, Italian villa, Italian farmhouse, move to Italy, move to Tuscany, learn Italian, buy a property in Italy, 1 euro homes Italy, real estate Italy

Id: 2QdUcheT4J4

Length: 32min 48sec (1968 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021