Who Manages Your Building in Montenegro: the Assembly, the Manager and the Joint Account

In brief, the picture looks like this.

Managing a building in Montenegro is the owners' obligation, not a service that appears on its own. There is no state body that will come and do it for you. The law assumes that apartment owners organise themselves: convene an assembly of unit owners, elect a chairperson, appoint a manager, register the building, open a bank account for it and pay into that account every month.

The fee is calculated by floor area, not per household. The formula in the law is one point per square metre of net residential area. The value of the point is set by the assembly itself, but it cannot be lower than 0.20 euros. For a 60 m² apartment that is a statutory minimum of 12 euros a month — and that is a floor, not a norm.

Almost anyone can be the manager. The law permits a fellow owner, another individual, a company, a cooperative or a sole trader. No licence is required today. This is simultaneously the most flexible and the most vulnerable part of the system.

You have to pay even if the building has no manager at all. The Ministry of Spatial Planning stated this explicitly in August 2026: the obligation to pay into the joint account flows directly from the law, not from whether the residents have reached an agreement.

Failure to organise management carries fines — and the 500-to-10,000-euro range that headlines love does not apply to everyone. There is a separate section on this below, because the press consistently oversimplifies here.

And the thing that makes this topic urgent right now. From 12 August to 8 September 2026, the Draft Law on the Management and Maintenance of Residential Buildings is out for public consultation. It raises the minimum point value from 0.20 to 0.30 euros, introduces licensing for managers and tightens debt collection. For now it is a draft and none of its figures are in force. But the ministry is accepting comments until 8 September.

If you are still at the research stage, this piece is best read alongside our guide to checking a property yourself before buying: the legal cleanliness of the apartment and the quality of the building's management are two separate checks, and almost nobody does the second one.

A Montenegrin building has two governing bodies, and they should not be confused.

The assembly of unit owners (skupština etažnih vlasnika) is the meeting of all owners of apartments and commercial units in the building. It decides. Its remit covers how the maintenance of the building and the urban plot is organised, the appointment of the manager, the maintenance programme and the level of the monthly fee. In its 2026 clarification the ministry adds the approval of the maintenance programme and of the annual report.

Note the wording of the statute: the manner of organising the work of maintaining the residential building and the urban plot is decided by the assembly of unit owners. Not the manager, not the municipality, not the developer. The assembly.

The manager (upravnik) is the executive. He implements the assembly's decisions, organises maintenance, keeps records of how funds are used and reports. He has his own obligations, listed individually in the statute — open the joint account, obtain a registration number for the building, ensure lift servicing, launch enforcement proceedings against non-payers, convene the constitutive assembly — and the law provides a separate sanction for failing each one.

The chairperson of the assembly is the third figure, often confused with the manager. This is an elected person from among the owners who represents the assembly. The law names them separately, including in the list of those who can be fined. Formally one person can hold both roles, but they are different functions: the chairperson acts on behalf of the owners, the manager acts under a contract with the assembly.

In its clarification of 17 July 2026 the ministry set out the relationship as plainly as possible: the manager cannot decide alone. Unit owners have the right to monitor his work and to demand access to financial documentation and activity reports. Maintenance costs are divided in proportion to apartment area, not in equal shares. The assembly approves the maintenance programme and the annual report. If a complaint is found to be justified, the manager must remedy the irregularity or compensate the damage — and the assembly is entitled to elect a new one.

The practical conclusion worth remembering before you sign anything: a manager in Montenegro is not the master of the building. He is a contractor to the assembly. If a particular complex is arranged the other way round, that is a departure from the law, not a local tradition.

This is probably the most important feature of the Montenegrin model, and it needs to be understood before you start assessing a particular building.

The statute says: a unit owner or another individual, a company, a legal entity, a housing cooperative or a sole trader may be elected as manager. No exam, no register of licences, no professional threshold is required under the law in force.

In practice this produces three very different configurations.

A neighbour as manager. In small buildings — and Montenegro has many — one of the owners takes it on. It is cheap, everyone knows one another, the sums on the account are modest. The weak point is competence: contracts with tradespeople, the annual report, the mandatory lift servicing and the debt-collection procedure all take time and understanding, and the person is doing it alongside everything else.

A specialist firm. In Podgorica and along the coast there are agencies that take a building on wholesale: cleaning, minor repairs, bookkeeping for the joint account, debt collection. This is the closest thing to what a foreign buyer means by property management. Quality varies widely, and it is judged not from a website but from a specific building: ask to see an entrance hall the firm has been running for three years.

The developer or a company connected to it. A common model in new complexes, especially on the coast. It has an advantage: in the early years nobody knows the building better than the people who built it. And it has an obvious conflict of interest: if a construction defect surfaces two years in, a manager tied to the developer is in an awkward position.

This is precisely why the draft of the new law introduces licensing, an exam and insurance. But that is still only a draft — today, in September 2026, the law requires no licence from a manager. Do not trust advertisements in which "licensed manager" appears as a legal status: for now that is marketing, not a document.

The question of maintenance quality connects directly to what happens to your apartment while you are away — for an owner living abroad, the building manager and the person who keeps an eye on the flat are two different problems, solved separately.

Here the arithmetic begins, and it is simpler than it sounds — once you understand the word "point" (bod).

The law does not set an amount in euros; it sets a unit of calculation. The monthly advance payment into the building's joint account is one point per square metre of net residential area or net commercial area, and half a point per square metre of net non-residential area. Then comes the key sentence: the value of the point, which may not be less than 0.2 euros, is determined by the assembly of unit owners.

Three things follow from this, and almost everyone gets them wrong.

First: 0.20 euros is a floor, not a price. The law forbids going below it — it does not forbid going above. A building with a pool, lifts, underground parking and landscaped grounds physically cannot be maintained for twenty cents per square metre, and a functioning assembly sets the point higher. Anyone who tells you "the law says twenty cents" is misreading it: the law says no less than twenty cents.

Second: the basis is net area, not gross. What is measured is the net area of your own unit — the floor area of the rooms — not your share of the building's total area.

Third: payment is proportional, not equal. The statute says explicitly that unit owners bear the costs of regular maintenance and of necessary and urgent works in proportion to the share of the net area of their units. The ministry repeated this in July 2026. The "everyone pays fifty euros per flat" model is not what the law provides for, even though it is encountered in small buildings.

In figures, at the statutory minimum point value:

a 40 m² flat — 8 euros a month; 50 m² — 10 euros; 60 m² — 12 euros; 80 m² — 16 euros; 100 m² — 20 euros.

Whether that is a lot or a little depends on your reference point. Compared with a building of the same class in Germany, it is very little. Compared with what a façade, a roof and a lift actually cost to keep up, it is also very little — and that is one of the reasons the ministry is proposing to raise the threshold.

Bear in mind, too, that the maintenance fee is not the whole cost of living in the flat. Electricity, water, waste collection, internet and property tax come on top and are billed separately; we broke that down in our piece on what it costs to run an apartment in Montenegro. The maintenance fee covers only the common parts of the building.

The law divides everything that happens in a building into three categories, and both the speed and the decision route depend on which one applies.

Regular maintenance. The everyday: cleaning, painting, upkeep of joinery and façade elements, routine servicing of lifts and installations. This is what the monthly advance is for. Here the manager acts within the programme approved by the assembly, without convening a meeting for every invoice.

Necessary works. The law puts here the reconstruction of the roof structure, load-bearing walls and the façade, and the replacement of installations. These are large sums that usually do not fit into the running fee and require either accumulated savings or a separate assembly decision on an additional levy.

Urgent works. The statutory wording: works that must be carried out without delay in order to protect people's life and health. A burst pipe, a piece of façade coming away, a lift failure, a short circuit. The manager must arrange these immediately — and it is precisely for failing to arrange urgent works that he is personally liable.

The practical meaning of this division for an owner is as follows. When you ask a manager "what are you doing with our money?", the answer you get is about the first category. But the most expensive events in a building's life — roof, façade, risers — sit in the second, and the question to ask the building is a different one: does this building put anything aside beyond running costs? If the joint account holds exactly what came in last month, the first serious leak turns into an emergency levy on residents.

Let us clear up one widespread misconception straight away. Montenegro has no mandatory reserve fund in the form that Serbian or Croatian legislation knows, or that a British or American condominium owner would expect. There are funds in the joint account and there are decisions of the assembly. Saving for future repairs is a matter of the assembly's will, not an automatic rule — and in most buildings it simply does not happen.

For a seaside building this is not an abstraction. Salt air accelerates the corrosion of metal components so much that we devoted a separate article to it, and damp with inadequate ventilation another one. All of that is ultimately paid for out of those same points, and falls under regular or necessary maintenance depending on how late it is noticed.

Before we go further into money, it is worth understanding what exactly you are paying for. The law answers this in a dedicated article.

Among the common parts of a residential building the law includes — in addition to those established by property law — the approach to the entrance, service rooms (for cleaning equipment, for prams and bicycles), rooms serving the residents (laundry, ironing), landscaped green and sports areas, and parking spaces.

And then comes a passage that directly concerns everyone buying in the touristic part of the country. For buildings in tourism zones the law additionally counts as common parts the rooms for receiving guests, the lobby, rooms for sport and recreation, gyms, saunas, swimming pools and premises for commercial activity.

This matters for two reasons.

First. If a complex has a pool and a gym, that is not a developer's perk that may one day disappear — by law it is a common part of the building, and the owners are obliged to maintain it through the same mechanism. Which means the realistic fee in such a building is necessarily above the twenty-cent minimum, and any salesperson promising "a pool and full service for twenty cents a square metre" has either not done the arithmetic or is not telling you everything.

Second. Because it is a common part, decisions about it belong to the assembly — not to an individual owner and not to the tenant of the ground-floor commercial unit. Who pays for heating the pool, which months it operates, who is responsible for supervision: all of that is the subject of an assembly decision and of the maintenance programme, not of a verbal arrangement.

If you are choosing between complexes, it is worth looking at the amenities from exactly this angle: every additional communal feature is an additional line in the monthly fee, for the entire life of the building. We touched on this logic when writing about where it is best to live in Montenegro: the range of communal spaces affects not only comfort but also permanent running costs.

This is where the Montenegrin system becomes unfamiliar to a foreign buyer. A building here does not automatically exist as an entity capable of doing anything. It has, to put it simply, to be registered.

The sequence runs as follows.

The assembly is constituted and elects a chairperson and a manager. The decisions taken are submitted to the competent local government body. The building applies to the Statistical Office (Monstat) and receives a registration number and an activity code. Once the statistical ruling is issued, the building's joint account is opened with a bank — a direct statutory obligation of the manager. A stamp is made.

Only after that can the building receive money into its account, sign contracts with tradespeople and appear as a party in enforcement proceedings.

Several practical points follow.

The money must not go into the manager's personal account. The law speaks of the zajednički račun stambene zgrade — the building's joint account. If a building collects cash or takes transfers to an individual's card, that is not a "simplified version" but the absence of a statutory structure — and you have no means whatsoever of checking how those funds are spent.

A building should have a documented history. Assembly decisions, the contract with the manager, statistical registration, account statements. That is exactly the package worth requesting before you buy — just as you request the title extract for the apartment itself.

Changing the manager is a procedure, not a conversation. The law gives the outgoing manager seven days from the end of his mandate to hand over the building's stamp and all documentation to the newly appointed one. The competent local government body, in turn, must inform the bank holding the joint account within three days. If the previous manager does not hand over the documents, the building effectively starts from zero — and that is one of the separately sanctioned breaches.

If you are buying in a building where no assembly has yet been formed — and in new developments this is very common — it helps to know the scale of the task.

According to the practice of the agencies that do this in Podgorica, the pack looks roughly like this: notice to unit owners with an agenda, sent at least five days before the meeting; minutes of the constitutive meeting; decision on constitution; decision electing the chairperson; decision appointing the manager; contract between the assembly and the manager; decision to produce the stamp; house rules together with the decision adopting them; decision to open the account; the title extract for the building; the application to the Statistical Office; and proof of payment of a 5-euro fee.

Then come registration, the statistical ruling and the opening of the account.

There are specialist providers for this too. The Podgorica firm Ulazi Podgorice, for instance, publishes a turnkey price for registering an assembly, stamp and fees included: 50 euros. That is one provider's price, not a market norm; we quote it as an order of magnitude, to show that the procedure itself is not expensive. What is expensive are the years in which nobody carries it out.

An important caveat for anyone taking their bearings from neighbouring countries. Montenegro has neither a register of housing communities nor the institution of a compulsorily appointed professional manager in the form that exists in Serbia. These are different laws of different states, and Serbian guides — of which there are far more online — simply do not apply here. Always check which country a document you are reading refers to.

The decision-making mechanics are described briefly in the statute and differ markedly from the share-weighted model familiar in most of Europe.

Each unit owner has one vote in the assembly. Not a vote weighted by floor area — one vote. The owner of a 35 m² studio and the owner of a 140 m² penthouse are equal in the assembly, even though they pay different amounts. Voting may be in person, by proxy or electronically.

The assembly is quorate if more than half its members are present. Then comes the exception that matters most in practice: if a quorum is not reached even after two notices, the assembly decides by a majority of the members present.

The purpose of that rule is clear enough — the legislator did not want a building held hostage by indifference. But the consequence deserves a clear-eyed look: if you do not attend meetings, the people who do attend decide for you. In a building where half the flats belong to foreigners who visit twice a year, the real decisions about money can be taken by a very small group.

Two practical recommendations follow. First, give a power of attorney to a neighbour or a manager you trust if you are rarely in the country — the law expressly allows voting through a representative. Second, establish in advance how meetings are called in your building: email, a messaging group, a notice in the entrance hall. Incidentally, the draft of the new law separately proposes allowing fully electronic meetings; today the statute refers to an electronic form of voting, not to a fully digital meeting.

A separate point for those who let their property: the owner votes, not the tenant. If you are letting your apartment as a business, the obligation to pay and the right to vote remain with you and do not pass to the tenant, unless you have specifically agreed otherwise by contract.

This is the section that earns the article its place if you are already an owner.

The law obliges the manager to keep records of how funds are used and to submit a written report within thirty days of the completion of regular maintenance works, as well as an annual report to the assembly. Failing to submit a report is a distinct offence with its own sanction.

On 17 July 2026 the Ministry of Spatial Planning described the scope of owners' rights even more broadly. Unit owners have the right to monitor the manager's work and to demand access to financial documentation and activity reports. The assembly approves the maintenance programme and the annual report. If owners lodge a complaint and it is found justified, the manager must remedy the breach or compensate the damage caused. The assembly is entitled to elect a new manager.

How to use this in practice — three things worth requesting once a year, without waiting for a conflict.

The joint account statement for the year. Not a summary table from the manager, but the bank statement. It answers two questions at once: how much actually came in, and how much actually went out.

The annual report and the minutes of the meeting that approved it. If there is a report but no minutes, nobody approved that report.

The contract between the assembly and the manager. It sets out exactly what he is answerable for and what fee he receives. The law in force places no upper limit on the manager's remuneration — that is a matter of contract. The new draft, conversely, would prescribe fixed percentages; more on that below.

If the manager refuses to produce the documents, you are not without instruments: compliance with the law is supervised by the housing inspectorate, and whether owners themselves remedy irregularities is checked by the municipal inspectorate.

The most painful subject in any building is the people who do not pay.

Here the law leaves the manager no discretion. If a unit owner fails to pay the monthly amount for more than three months, the manager is obliged to launch enforcement proceedings — and to do so within eight days of that deadline passing. This is not a power but a duty, and failing it makes the manager liable as for his other breaches; the same provision is expressly subject to inspection supervision. The legislator's logic is sound: leave collection to discretion and a building with a few persistent non-payers falls apart within a few years, with the neighbours paying on their behalf.

Note this: the three-month rule is law in force, not a novelty. Coverage of the forthcoming law presents tough collection as something new, even though the deadline has been in the statute from the start. What is new in the draft is something else — that the debt itself becomes an enforceable instrument; see below.

What this means for a foreign owner who is rarely in the country: unpaid fees do not wait for your next visit, enforcement proceedings begin, and you may learn about them considerably later than they started. So the first thing to do after buying is to make sure the manager has a working contact for you and that you know where and when to pay.

The scale is hard to judge — nobody publishes aggregate statistics. The only published illustration we found is older: in July 2020 the CdM portal reported that the agency Akvila had initiated 347 enforcement proceedings since the beginning of June, with the agency's director explaining that this has to be done automatically and that it is a last resort. We cite it with its date and do not extrapolate to today — more recent figures are not publicly available. The point of the reference is a single one: the mechanism is not decorative, it is genuinely used.

The same 2020 publication mentioned another figure — four municipal inspectors for the entire country. We could not verify whether that still holds, so we do not carry it forward to 2026. But the overall picture that emerges from the law and from practice is this: the state has little influence over discipline inside a building — the manager has it over a non-payer, through the courts.

The question almost every new-build buyer stumbles over — and one the ministry answered only recently, on 3 August 2026.

The obligation to bear maintenance costs arises at the moment a person acquires the status of unit owner, that is, on registration of the ownership right in the real estate cadastre. Not on the preliminary contract, not on the final instalment, not on handover of the keys.

That clarification is worth remembering verbatim, because two things follow from it.

Until you are in the cadastre, you are not legally obliged to pay into the joint account. This does not mean nobody can ask you for a payment: contractual obligations exist in parallel, and in complexes at the handover stage such a payment is usually agreed. The distinction is worth knowing — one flows from the law, the other from a document you signed.

Once registered, the obligation arises automatically, regardless of whether you live in the flat, let it out or leave it empty. Non-use does not exempt you from the fee — the money goes on preserving common property that is yours in any case.

The ministry made a separate point: if a previous occupant assumed the payment obligation under their own contract, the debt nevertheless remains attached to the owner registered in the cadastre. In other words, before buying it is worth asking not only about encumbrances on the flat but about arrears on the maintenance fee — a separate item that does not appear on the title extract. We wrote about this in our survey of the fifteen mistakes buyers make; maintenance debts are among those that surface only after the notary.

The timelines and sequence of registration itself we described in the piece on how to buy an apartment in Montenegro, and the tax side in the material on tax on property purchase.

The headline that residents face up to 10,000 euros if they have no building management has been circulating in Montenegrin media since 2019. It rests on a real provision but simplifies it into inaccuracy. Let us look closely, because the difference is substantial.

In its penalty provisions the law sets different ranges for different addressees:

a legal entity as unit owner — 500 to 10,000 euros; a unit owner acting as chairperson of the assembly — 500 to 10,000 euros; a user of a private or common part — 500 to 10,000 euros; a responsible person within a legal entity — 30 to 2,000 euros; an individual — 30 to 2,000 euros.

So for an ordinary private owner whose building has no management organised, the range is 30 to 2,000 euros, not 500 to 10,000. The ten thousand is the ceiling for legal entities and for those who have taken on an elected role in the building.

A separate article penalises the developer: 500 to 10,000 euros — there is a dedicated section on this below.

And a separate article penalises the manager: a legal entity 500 to 10,000 euros, a sole trader 150 to 2,000 euros, a responsible person or individual 30 to 2,000 euros. For the manager the list of offences is the longest: failing to arrange lift servicing and inspections, failing to arrange urgent works, failing to take steps to recover debts, failing to apply for the registration number, failing to open the joint account, failing to keep records of funds, failing to report to the assembly, failing to convene the constitutive meeting, failing to hand over the stamp and documentation to a successor.

Why this is worth knowing: not in order to calculate the cost of doing nothing, but to judge correctly who in the building carries the real risk. The greatest exposure falls on whoever agreed to be chairperson or manager: a higher range, more grounds. That, incidentally, is one reason volunteers for those roles are so hard to find in Montenegrin buildings.

Whether a unit owner has remedied irregularities is checked by the municipal inspectorate. There is a second tier of supervision that is barely written about: the housing inspectorate within the inspection authority checks the local administration itself — whether the municipality keeps registers of unit owners and managers, whether it appoints a manager where there is none, whether it issues registration numbers and notifies banks of a change of manager. What is supervised, in other words, is not only the building but the municipality.

A distinct and highly practical provision that new-build buyers should know by heart.

The law imposes three obligations on the developer: to bear on his own the costs of regular, necessary and urgent works on the building and the plot; to organise the maintenance of the building; and to take the steps required to form the governing bodies. The period is one year from the day the ownership right is transferred over at least one unit, that is, from the registration of that change in the cadastre. For non-compliance: a fine of 500 to 10,000 euros.

Read that carefully, because it contains two distinct statements.

In the first year, maintenance is at the developer's expense. Not at the expense of the first residents to move in. If a maintenance fee is being collected in a new complex immediately after occupation and a year has not passed since the first cadastral registration, that is a question to put directly, with a reference to the statute.

Forming the assembly is also the developer's task, not the residents'. It is precisely he who must, within that same one-year period, take the steps to form the governing bodies. This is probably the most underestimated point: buyers often assume they must organise themselves, and then fail to organise for years.

What follows for choosing a development: the question of who will manage this building belongs before the purchase contract, not after it, and the answer "the residents will decide that for themselves later" is legally incomplete — the law places the first step on the developer. How a developer responds to that question is part of the same work as checking the project documentation, and it often says more about a company than its renderings do.

Remember, too, that a building is a structure that lives for decades under specific conditions. We described separately how seismic risk shapes construction in Montenegro: the quality of the load-bearing structure and the quality of subsequent maintenance are two halves of the same question about how this building will be standing in twenty years.

The law also provides for the scenario of complete inaction.

If unit owners do not form governing bodies, the competent local government body is required to appoint an interim manager. The appointment is for a period of up to three months.

It is worth understanding correctly what this is. It is not a punishment and not a transfer of the building into municipal ownership or control. It is a transitional measure so that the building at least has someone who can open an account, sign a waste-collection contract and call out an emergency repair. Three months is the window in which residents are expected to get together and elect their own.

What an owner should note: the interim manager was not appointed by you and the contract with him was not signed by you, but you still have to pay — the obligation flows from the law, not from the existence of a contract. That is exactly what the ministry confirmed in August 2026: you pay even when there is no manager at all.

And a second detail: because this is a transitional figure with a three-month mandate, they have neither the incentive nor the time for anything long-term — saving for the roof, energy efficiency, façade renovation. A building living on a chain of interim managers is a building without a planning horizon. When buying on the secondary market this is worth asking about directly: how long has this building had the same manager?

Everything above is law in force. Now for what is being proposed, with a mandatory caveat: this is a draft, and none of the figures below are currently in effect.

The Ministry of Spatial Planning, Urbanism and State Property has put the Draft Law on the Management and Maintenance of Residential Buildings out for public consultation. It runs from 12 August to 8 September 2026; comments are accepted by email at marko.vico@mdup.gov.me and by post to IV proleterske brigade 19, 81000 Podgorica. The consultation closes with a round table on 7 September 2026 in Podgorica, at the ministry's premises, from 10:30 to 15:00.

What the draft contains, according to reports by Investitor and CdM.

A minimum point value of 0.30 instead of 0.20 euros. A fifty per cent increase. In practice: 50 m² from 10 to 15 euros a month, 60 m² from 12 to 18, 80 m² from 16 to 24, 100 m² from 20 to 30. The ministry's argument in the explanatory memorandum: the threshold of 0.20 euros per square metre has not changed since 2016 and no longer secures an adequate volume of funds.

A fixed split of the money collected. At least 15 per cent to the manager, at least 5 per cent to the chairperson of the assembly, the remainder — at least 80 per cent — into maintenance itself. Today the law prescribes no percentages; the manager's fee follows from the contract.

Professionalisation of managers. A manager must be a registered company or sole trader, hold a licence, pass an exam and carry professional indemnity insurance of at least 5,000 euros. This closes precisely the gap described in the third section above.

The debt as an enforceable instrument. The manager's duty to start collection after more than three months of arrears exists today as well; the draft adds the decisive element — the fee debt itself acquires the force of an enforceable instrument. That materially shortens the path from non-payment to enforcement.

Transparency. A mandatory joint bank account, monthly reports to residents by the tenth of the month, an annual financial report, a right of inspection access to the building's bank data, and the option of fully electronic meetings.

Sanctions: up to 10,000 euros for legal entities and up to 2,000 euros for individuals.

If adopted, the law would enter into force on the eighth day after publication but would only begin to apply after twelve months — giving buildings a year to adapt.

The market's reaction is predictably split. The Adria TV portal collected voices of residents unhappy with the increase; the typical argument is that the building is new and regularly maintained, and that even what is paid today is a lot. An industry representative counters that the prices of everything the service is made of have risen substantially and that some buildings have already moved to thirty cents voluntarily. Both are the opinions of market participants in a dated publication, not statistics.

Our editorial position is straightforward and does not coincide with either side. The argument over twenty versus thirty cents is secondary to the question of where that money goes and whether anyone ever sees it. A building that collects thirty cents with no accounting is worse than one that collects twenty but produces a bank statement once a year. Which is why the substantively most important part of the draft is not the figure attached to the point, but the monthly reports, the licence and the insurance.

If you are an owner in Montenegro, you formally have until 8 September to make your views known. How many private comments make it into the final text is an open question — but the channel exists and it is public.

Let us pull together what actually helps when choosing.

Does the building have an assembly and a manager, and since when. A building with the same manager for five years and a building that has burned through three interim ones are, with identical apartments, two very different buildings.

What is the point value in this building. If you are quoted the statutory twenty cents while the complex has a pool, lifts and secured grounds, ask them to walk you through the arithmetic. One of two things is true: either there is a hidden additional payment, or maintenance is underfunded and the difference will show up later.

Is there anything in the joint account. That is the answer to the question of who pays for the roof. The law knows no mandatory reserve fund, so savings are the result of a deliberate decision by the assembly. Having none is not a defect in a new building — but it should be a conscious fact.

Are there arrears on this particular apartment. They do not show on the title extract. You ask the manager, not the seller.

Has a year passed since the first registration of ownership in the cadastre. If not, maintenance is the developer's responsibility, and that should be said out loud.

How are meetings called, and is proxy voting possible. For an owner living in another country this is not a formality but the only way to take part in decisions about their own money.

At Zen Gardens we are building a 24-apartment house in Bar, and the management question is not abstract for us: the smaller the building, the more visible both the quality of maintenance and its cost per apartment. A small building is easier to gather into an assembly and easier to bring to agreement — but it also has fewer square metres over which to spread the lift, the façade and the grounds. We think this conversation belongs before the contract rather than after it, and we answer the questions on the list above directly, including the uncomfortable ones. You can look at the project and put them to us on the project page.

If you are still getting to know the country, read this alongside a few others. What life here costs overall is in the cost of living in Montenegro. Prices for the apartments themselves, city by city, in our survey of price per square metre. If you are weighing buying against renting — in the analysis of long-term rentals. If you are counting on a loan — in the piece on mortgages for foreigners. On life in the country without the gloss — in our honest account of Montenegro. On Bar itself — in the full city guide.

And finally. Building management belongs to the category of things that are impossible to see when viewing an apartment and easy to check with a single phone call. We wrote about that asymmetry in a short column on the most expensive mistake a buyer can make — the one the eye cannot detect. A building's manager falls squarely into that category.