Aktivni zahtjevi: why a clean encumbrance section guarantees nothing

Take a mortgage application filed on 3 March and decided on 20 April. Its effect against third parties dates from 3 March. A buyer who completes on 1 April buys a property that, as of 20 April, has carried a mortgage since March — and the encumbrance section read on 1 April was entirely accurate in showing nothing.

This is not a loophole or a failure of the register. It is the register working as designed: whoever files first prevails, and the delay between filing and decision is when the sheet and the legal position differ. The same rule protects you once your own application is in.

Article 12 also obliges the authority to record the number and the time of an application in the property sheet immediately on receipt, and to publish the application data on its website. That obligation is why Podaci o aktivnim zahtjevima is printed on the sheet at all — it is not one of the five parts the law defines in Article 53.

So the gap between filing and decision is disclosed by design. The information is there, in the one section an extract is most likely to omit — which is a reason to insist on the full transcript: PREPIS or IZVOD, and which one to ask for.

The section is a table, and the columns are these:

The wording is terse and formulaic. It opens with ZA UPIS — "for registration of" — and what follows is the thing that will exist once the application is granted.

A notation deserves particular attention, because the law lets a very wide range of facts be entered this way: litigation over the property, a ban on disposal, insolvency, a legalisation decision, a building started or completed without a permit, a building whose investor never obtained an occupancy permit. Some of those are administrative housekeeping. Others say the property cannot lawfully be sold.

An application filed this month and still pending is ordinary — decisions take time. An application from four years ago that is still open is something else: a case that stalled, usually because it is contested or because a document could not be produced.

It also has not gone away. Whenever it is decided, its effect still dates from the year in that column, ahead of every registration made since — including yours.

There is a second mechanism worth knowing. Under Article 100 a right holder may enter a notation of priority (zabilježba prvenstvenog reda) announcing an intention to sell the property or to mortgage it, which reserves a place in the priority order for a transaction that has not happened yet. The document behind it may be drawn up before or after the notation is requested.

These reservations expire, and Article 102 sets the periods: one year where a mortgage is to be created, sixty days in all other cases, with the expiry date stated in the decision itself. So the notation on a sheet you are reading may already be spent — or may have weeks left to run, holding a place ahead of you.

Read the section, then read it again on the day you sign. Between an offer and a notary appointment there are usually weeks, and everything in this article happens in exactly that window. A sheet pulled at the start of the process answers a question you are no longer asking.

That is the whole reason we sell monitoring alongside reports: the register is re-checked on a schedule and you are told what changed, including applications filed after your report was delivered. You can add it to an order. If you would rather do it yourself, pull a fresh transcript the day before completion and compare the pending applications section line by line.

We read this section for a living, translate every entry and keep the original Montenegrin wording beside it, so a notary sees what the register said rather than our paraphrase. Order a report for a KO and an LN, or look at a sample first.