Property

Como Private Property

The property desk handles enquiries about buying and selling on the lake, and the introductions that go with them: notaries, surveyors, lawyers and the architects who work on protected buildings.

Based in Lake Como

It writes the buying, ownership and cost material here. None of it is advice, and where a number depends on your circumstances the page says so and points you at somebody qualified.

Writes about

Buying and selling on Lake Como
Italian conveyancing process
Protected and historic buildings

Guides by this desk

Buying on Lake Como: Foreign BuyersHow an Italian purchase actually proceeds, from the first written offer to the deed signed in front of the notary, and what a buyer from outside Italy needs in place before any of it can begin.

The Cost of Owning a VillaThe standing annual cost of a lake house is decided less by its size than by its garden, its water frontage and whether anybody is living in it. Almost nobody budgets for the last of those.

Lake Como Property TaxesThree different authorities tax an Italian house, at three different moments, on a value that is not the price you paid. Understanding which is which explains most of what confuses foreign owners.

Renovating a Historic VillaTwo separate constraints sit over almost every old house on this shore, materials arrive by barge or by hand, and the working season is the one nobody wants to be here for. That is why programmes slip and budgets move.

Journal pieces

Buying Property on Lake Como as a Foreign ResidentThe legal sequence is set out in our guide for foreign buyers. This is the human one: the two years it takes, the family you are really negotiating with, and the room where it finally happens.

What It Really Costs to Own a Villa on Lake ComoOur guide sets out the line items. This is what the first three years actually feel like from the inside: the order the bills arrive in, the conversations that set the number, and the economies that cost the most.

The Case for CernobbioAlmost everybody chooses this lake by looking at photographs of the middle of it. The first basin answers a different question: not where the lake is at its most beautiful, but where you could keep a life.

Waterfront or View? The Lake Como Decision Nobody Argues About ProperlyBuyers treat height above the water as a compromise on the real thing. It is not a compromise. It is a different property, with a different view, a different day and a different set of costs. For most people it is the better house.

The Lake Road ProblemBuyers choose a house on this lake by its view, and then spend the next twenty years organising their lives around a road they never looked at.