What to check before you buy a house in Italy.

Why technical checks almost always happen too late

In an Italian house purchase, no step in the standard process compares the building with the drawings that were approved for it. Buyers arriving from the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States or Germany usually assume somebody does, because at home somebody does.

This is who does what in Italy, and what each of them leaves untouched.

• The estate agent runs the negotiation and the paperwork that moves it forward. Checking the building against its permits is not part of the agency mandate, and no law puts it there.
• The notary works on title and on the deed. He does not visit the property and does not measure it.
• The bank's valuer estimates what the property is worth as security for the mortgage. That is a valuation commissioned by the lender, not a compliance check.
• The seller declares. Often in good faith: many sellers inherited the house, or bought it themselves without checks, and genuinely do not know what was altered or when.

There is no Italian equivalent of the local searches a solicitor runs as a matter of course, and no survey built into the transaction. Both exist as services. Neither is part of the process. The buyer has to ask for them.

Everything that was never declared stays with the building. On the day the deed is signed it becomes the buyer's problem, together with the cost of putting it right.

What the notary checks, and what nobody checks

The Italian notary verifies title, the entries in the public property registers, and the declarations the parties place in the deed. The notary does not verify the building.

In practice the notary establishes who owns the property and how they came to own it, traces the chain of earlier transfers, searches the registers for mortgages, charges, seizures and registered easements, and makes sure the deed carries the planning references and the cadastral conformity declaration that Italian law requires.

That last item repays close reading. The statement that the property matches its filed cadastral plan is made by the seller, or attested by a qualified technician. The notary records the declaration. Nobody walks the house with a tape measure.

The notary checks the documents and the deed. Nobody measures the house against its approved drawings unless the buyer pays a technician to do it.

The consequence is uncomfortable. A completely valid deed can transfer a property with a terrace enclosed without permission, an attic converted into a bedroom, or a flat split in two and never recorded at the Catasto. The deed holds. The building does not.

Planning compliance: the building and its permits

Planning compliance, conformità urbanistica, is the match between the building as it stands and the permits that authorised its construction and every later alteration. There is one way to establish it: obtain the building file from the comune and compare it, drawing by drawing, with the property in front of you.

The file is obtained through a formal request for access to records, accesso agli atti, at the municipal technical office. The comune has thirty days by law to respond and many use all of them. The request must come from the owner or from someone with a qualified interest, so a buyer who is not yet the owner needs written authority from the seller. Asking for it early is what saves weeks later.

What the file should contain:

• The original permit: licenza edilizia, concessione edilizia or permesso di costruire, with its date.
• Every later filing: DIA, SCIA, CILA and variations approved during the works, each with its own drawings.
• Any amnesty application, condono, with proof of the payments and the final decision. An application lodged and never concluded is not a regularisation.
• For older buildings, evidence that construction predates 1 September 1967, the date from which a building licence became compulsory across the whole of every municipality.

Neither pre-1967 status nor an amnesty covers what was done afterwards. Each settles a defined moment; anything built later has to stand on a permit of its own.

The common problems are not new buildings. They are ordinary alterations nobody filed: balconies and loggias glazed in, canopies and porches added, attics made habitable, garages turned into rooms, windows moved on a facade, units split or merged, a change of use from store or workshop to dwelling.

This matters well beyond completion. Planning compliance governs whether you can get a permit for the work you have in mind, how a lender assesses the file, and what happens when you sell, because the next buyer will ask exactly the same questions.

Cadastral compliance: the filed plan against the actual layout

Cadastral compliance is the match between the plan filed at the Catasto and the real internal layout of the property. It is the quickest check to start, because the seller can obtain the filed plan within a day.

The planimetria catastale is the drawing of the individual unit held by the Agenzia delle Entrate, showing the scale, the use of each room and the boundary of the sub-unit. Alongside it, the visura lists sheet, parcel, sub-unit, category, class, size band and the cadastral income on which Italian property taxes are calculated. The check is blunt: measure what is there and lay it over what is filed.

The mismatches are mundane and very common. An internal wall moved. A bathroom carved out of a store cupboard. Two rooms made into one. A balcony glazed in. A low storage space counted as habitable.

One distinction is worth memorising, because it causes more confusion than anything else on this page. Cadastral compliance and planning compliance are not the same thing. The Catasto exists for tax purposes and proves neither ownership nor lawful construction. A property can have a perfectly current cadastral plan and still be unlawful in planning terms, and it can be lawfully built while its plan is decades out of date.

Updating the plan is done through a DOCFA filing. Where the mismatch comes from unpermitted work, the DOCFA updates the drawing without legalising the work. They are two separate routes, and they have to be taken in the right order.

Structural condition and the seismic zone of the municipality

Structural condition is the part of a pre-purchase check that yields the least certainty, and that has to be said before it starts. A non-destructive inspection describes what is visible and accessible. It does not measure the load-bearing capacity of an existing building.

Every Italian municipality sits in a seismic zone assigned by regional classification, and the whole of Abruzzo sits in seismic zone 1, 2 or 3, including municipalities in the two highest bands. The zone governs what may be done to a building and how: work that is straightforward elsewhere requires structural design, calculation, and a filing or authorisation with the regional Genio Civile office.

What an inspection covers:

• Construction type: masonry, reinforced concrete, mixed, or an extension built against an older core.
• Visible cracking: direction, width, position relative to openings and floors, and any recent filling or decoration over it.
• Signs of movement: walls out of plumb, floors and thresholds out of level, doors that no longer close squarely.
• Rising damp, roof leaks, and the state of the timber where the roof space can be entered.
• Ring beams, ties and other connecting elements, where they can be identified.

The documents are read alongside. If structural work has been carried out, a deposited structural design and the corresponding filings should exist. Obvious structural work with no paper trail at all is itself a finding.

What a visual inspection cannot tell you is whether the structure is adequate for the seismic demand at that site. Establishing that requires material testing, exploratory openings and a calculation on the existing building. It is a separate engagement, it needs the owner's consent, and before a sale a seller rarely grants it. If you need an answer at that level, it has to be negotiated before you make an offer.

Services, habitability and the paperwork to insist on

The documentation is the simplest part of a property to check and the part most often incomplete. Every missing document has a price: either it is reconstructed, or you buy without knowing.

• Declarations of conformity for the electrical, water and gas installations, issued by the installing firm under Ministerial Decree 37/2008, with the required annexes. For older installations the rules allow, under defined conditions, a dichiarazione di rispondenza drawn up by someone holding the prescribed qualifications.
• The boiler or heat pump logbook and the most recent efficiency inspection report.
• The habitability certificate, certificato di agibilità, or the certified notification that replaced it. Many older buildings never had one; it is worth knowing that it is missing, and why.
• A valid energy performance certificate, the APE, which the seller must make available and attach to the deed. The APE is issued by an accredited certifier entered in the regional register: I do not issue it. I check that the figures on it are consistent with the property and with the documents examined.
• For land and appurtenances, the certificato di destinazione urbanistica issued by the comune.
• For flats in a condominio: the regulation, the millesimal tables, minutes of recent meetings, and a statement from the administrator covering approved works, works in progress and arrears. This is not a formality: an incoming owner is jointly liable with the seller for the service charges of the current year and the one before it.

The useful question is not whether the documents exist. It is whether they describe the property you actually visited.

When to run the checks: before the offer, before the compromesso, never after completion

The right moment for a technical check is before you sign the proposta d'acquisto, the written offer. The last useful moment is before the compromesso, the binding preliminary contract. After completion the buyer has no leverage left, only the house, its irregularities and the cost of resolving them.

1. Before the offer. The visura and cadastral plan, the listing, the photographs and one visit are already enough to see whether there are obvious discrepancies and whether it is worth going on. This is the stage at which you can still change your mind without consequences.
2. In the offer and the preliminary contract. A satisfactory technical check can be made a condition of the purchase, and the seller can be bound to grant the authority needed for access to the municipal records. The clause is drafted by the notary or by the lawyer advising you; I supply the technical content to put into it and the timescales that make it workable.
3. Before the compromesso. This is the full check: access to records, an inspection with measurements, comparison of the built state against the cadastral plan and the permits, review of the installation paperwork, and a written report. The preliminary contract is already binding, and signing it blind means committing to buy something nobody has verified.
4. Before completion. Confirm that what was agreed has actually been done: filings lodged, cadastral plan updated, documents handed over. Promises do not transfer with the deed.
5. After completion. Only remedies remain: negotiation with the seller, regularisation at your own expense and, in some cases, litigation. All of them slower and more expensive than the check that would have prevented them.

What to ask the seller and the agent

The questions to put to a seller and an agent before making an offer are few, and they are best put in writing, by email, so the answer survives. They are not aggressive questions. They ask for documents that anyone selling a compliant property should already hold.

• The deed by which the seller acquired the property, and a current cadastral extract.
• The filed cadastral plan itself, not the marketing floor plan redrawn for the listing.
• A full list of the building permits with number and date, variations included.
• The references of any amnesty application and the decision that closed it.
• The declarations of conformity for the installations.
• A valid APE and, if one exists, the habitability certificate or notification.
• Written authority to request the building file from the comune.
• For a flat, the administrator's latest statement on charges and resolutions.

Then the question that is worth all the others: is the property today exactly as the approved drawings show it? If the answer is yes, putting it in writing is the easiest confirmation to obtain. If the answer is vague, deferred or uncomfortable, that hesitation is already a technical finding, and it is the moment to have the documents read by a technician.