Sellers of houses without papers have to wait for decisions under the new law before they can sell them. How much time will be required for this is not known, since the new law did not foresee deadlines for issuing a decision on the registration of property rights. The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, said at the beginning of February that the first decisions based on the Law on Special Conditions for Recording and Enrolling Property Rights on Real Estate could be issued at the end of February or the beginning of March.
The director and owner of the real estate agency Heroldo Nekretnine from Jagodina, Milena Ristić, tells Biznis.rs that, according to the information she has, in the area of Jagodina, Ćuprije and Paraćin, people have not yet started to receive solutions based on the law. "Every man for himself".
He adds that the problem is that the new law no longer applies to the Law on the Legalization of Buildings, according to which the status of real estate was resolved without documentation in a short time.
Deadline unknown
"Previously, we used to finish it easily - when someone wants to sell a house, and we see that the papers are not in order, we advise him to go for legalization. This is usually completed within a month and then the owner can sell. The law is no longer valid, it has been repealed, and now the owner of the house can only submit a request for registration of 'Svoj na Svome' until October, but by law there is no deadline by which the state will issue a decision that it has been registered," she explains.
This is why there has been a standstill in the trade in that type of real estate because there is no time frame in which a solution can be expected, and real estate that does not have proper papers cannot be sold at a notary.
"We don't know what to tell the clients. Whether it will be a deadline of one month, six months, one year or five years... For now, the information is that still, at least here in our areas, people have not received solutions under the new law," says Ristic.
Frozen assets
According to her, most of the owners who want to sell such real estate submit applications for the registration of ownership rights, but they do not take such real estate for sale because it is a so-called frozen property.
"As an agency, we don't even accept to sell such real estate, because we don't know when the conditions for sale will be met. It's stupid to negotiate a price because the question is how much the house will be worth on the market if, for example, a solution is obtained in a year," says Ristic.
The interlocutor expressed the hope that the state will recognize this problem and that it will soon provide a solution.
"It creates big problems for us, because in the rural areas we work in, in most cases, the documentation is not in order," says Ristić.
The absence of a deadline for the registration of property rights has been pointed out before as one of the major weaknesses of this law.
The lawyer of the City Expert agency Aleksandra Andrejić previously told Biznis.rs that the law did not prescribe a deadline in which the Agency for Spatial Planning and Urban Planning of Serbia is obliged to issue a certificate on the basis of which the entry in the cadastre is made, nor does it prescribe the deadline in which the RGZ is obliged to make the entry on the basis of the certificate. That, as she stated, brings potential chaos to legal security, because citizens do not know when they can expect their registration to be completed.
"Many applications were submitted without any documentation because the law allowed it, so we will see what will happen when the Spatial Planning and Urbanism Agency of Serbia takes a specific case into work, what difficulties we will encounter then," said Andrejić.
Call
The deadline for submitting applications for recording and registering illegal buildings formally expired on February 8, and the state gave the opportunity to those who for "justifiable reasons" failed to apply within the stipulated period to do so by October 24, with the submission of appropriate evidence.
Justifiable reasons for reporting after the deadline are illness, injury, death or illness of a close family member, force majeure, some technical problem such as a system crash, and other reasons for which the party is not to blame.
Source: Biznis.rs
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