According to Jutarnji List, the first 140 apartments owned by the City of Zagreb should soon be up for sale.
This is a mass sale of city property, but the problem is that many of them do not have the paperwork to prove ownership.
Thus, tomorrow at the City Assembly meeting, a precedent is likely to occur – by adopting the proposal to amend the Decision on the Sale of City Apartments, it will be possible to sell property that the City has not managed to register in the land registry. The decision has been blocked for years by the SDP due to fears that it would allow illegal users and squatters to go unpunished, but Mayor Milan Bandić now has the majority in the Assembly to push through this proposal as well.
The City of Zagreb manages 6,376 apartments. Of these, 2,644 have already been crossed out – due to the amendment of the Law on the Management of State Property, the state must return these apartments. They are handed over to the State Office for Management of State Property (DUUDI), and the remaining 3,732 apartments will be subject to either rental or sale.
At this moment, only 585 apartments are registered, and 143 can go up for sale, considering that, as our sources tell us, apartments housing social cases and protected tenants will never be for sale.
Since the process of proving ownership for the remaining 3,147 apartments is too lengthy, the City has come up with a way to solve their problem: they will sell them unregistered, and at a 30 percent lower price. The first such apartments will hit the market by mid-September.
The city administration does not dare to predict how many apartments will be sold in total or how much this would bolster the city budget. The last estimates date back to 2011, when it was announced that by selling the first 20 apartments, the City planned to earn 30 million kuna.
At that time, it was estimated that a total of 2,000 apartments would be put up for sale, which could mean more than a billion kuna in additional revenue for the city budget in the future.
According to information from Jutarnji List, the price per square meter, once the apartments are on the market, should range from 1,000 to a maximum of 2,000 euros, which means that the unregistered ones could stand at up to 700 euros per square meter.
– Each apartment will be assessed by court experts, and the price will include several parameters, from the location of the apartment in the building, its condition, and distance from the city center. It is expected that an unregistered apartment could be worth up to 30 percent less than the market price, so it is likely that some apartments will be priced very favorably at 700 euros per square meter – said a source from the city administration.
