Buying Property on Lake Como as a Foreign Resident

The single most common failure among foreign buyers on this lake is not legal, financial or technical. It is temperamental. People arrive from markets where speed is a virtue and decisiveness is rewarded, make a strong offer quickly, press for an answer, and are quietly removed from consideration by a family who concluded from the pressure that the buyer would be difficult.

Understand who you are dealing with. A large share of the houses worth owning here have been in the same hands for three or four generations. The owners are not liquidating an asset; they are deciding whether to stop being the family who has the house on the lake. That decision has been under discussion for years before it reaches anybody like us, and it can be suspended for a season because one cousin has changed her mind. This is not obstruction. It is the ordinary emotional weather of a generational sale, and it is entirely reasonable.

What that means in practice is that the correct posture is patient interest rather than urgency. Show up. Look at the house properly and say specific things about it. Do not talk about what you would demolish. Be clear about your funding without waving it around. And then be prepared to wait, sometimes through a winter, for a decision that has nothing to do with you.

We have watched houses sell to the second-highest offer more times than we can count, and in every case the reason was the same: the family preferred the buyer. On this lake, and particularly for anything with real provenance, the price is one variable among several and is frequently not the decisive one.

The legal expression of everything above is succession. When an owner dies in Italy the property passes to the heirs, and unless and until that succession has been formally registered, the house cannot be sold cleanly. On the lake, where houses stay in families for a century and are then divided among five siblings and their children, this is not an edge case. It is the normal condition of the market.

The practical effect is that your counterparty may be seven people, one of whom lives in Buenos Aires, one of whom has not spoken to another for a decade, and one of whom is a minor with a court-appointed representative. Every one of them has to sign, or has to grant a power of attorney to somebody who will. Assembling that is a job, it takes months, and it is a job that starts only when the family has decided to do it.

So the first serious question to ask about any house, before the survey and before the price, is a boring one: has the succession been registered, and is every owner identified and available? An honest agent will know the answer. If the answer is no, the house is not for sale yet, whatever the listing says. It is a house that may be for sale in a year, and it is perfectly reasonable to be interested in it on that basis as long as you are not planning around a summer.

The related question is what is actually included. Old family houses on the lake come with things that are not obviously part of the title: a right of way across a neighbour's land, a share in a landing stage, a strip of shoreline held under a concession from the state, a chapel, a piece of woodland three fields up the hill that has been used for firewood since anyone can remember. Some of these are registered and some are custom. Establishing which is which before you are committed is the whole of due diligence in one sentence.

Almost every house on this lake is viewed in the sunshine, and it is very hard to overstate how much that distorts the decision. A property that is glorious at six on an evening in June may be in complete shadow from two in the afternoon in November, may be reached by a road that is genuinely alarming in the wet, and may sit above a stretch of shoreline that has a bar with a sound system on it from May to September.

So make the second viewing a bad one, deliberately. Go in the rain. Go in February, when the trees are bare and you can see what is actually behind the house and how close the neighbour is. Go on a Sunday in August and try to park. Stand on the terrace at four in the afternoon in November and see whether the sun is on it. Every one of these tells you something a summer viewing structurally cannot.

Then see it from the water, which is the view you will actually live with and the one that reveals the house's real position: how exposed the frontage is to the southerly, whether the jetty is protected or takes the full fetch of the basin, how much of the garden the retaining wall is doing the work of holding up, and whether the elevation that faces the lake has been repaired recently or merely painted.

The deeper point is that on this lake a house's aspect is a permanent characteristic and almost everything else is a project. You can rebuild a kitchen, restore a ceiling, replant a terrace and rewire a villa. You cannot move the mountain that takes your sun away at three o'clock in January, and you cannot create a landing stage where the regime does not permit one.

The completion of an Italian purchase is a peculiar and rather moving piece of theatre, and nothing about it resembles the process buyers from common-law countries expect. There is no exchange of contracts by telephone between solicitors. Everybody goes to the notary's office, in person or through a properly executed power of attorney, and sits down together at a table.

The deed is then read aloud. All of it. In Italian, by the notary, at pace, while the parties sit there. The buyer, the seller or the several sellers, the agents, sometimes an aunt who has come because she wants to see it done. If you do not speak Italian well enough to follow a legal document being read at speed, the law requires the presence of an interpreter and the deed is accompanied by a translation, which means the reading happens twice and the afternoon is not short. This is not a formality to be waived; it is the point of the exercise, and the fact that the notary is a public officer verifying that everybody present understood what they signed is what makes an Italian deed as robust as it is.

Money moves in a form the notary is satisfied with rather than by casual transfer on the day, and the arrangements for it have to be made in advance. Then the keys are handed over, usually with no ceremony whatsoever, and frequently in a plastic bag. Somebody explains which one is for the boathouse. Somebody else mentions that the gardener comes on Tuesdays. Then everybody stands up and it is done, and you own a house in Italy.

Our advice about the day is straightforward: be there if you possibly can. A purchase completed by power of attorney is legally identical and emotionally hollow, and more usefully, being in the room is the moment when the seller's family tells you all the things about the house that were never going to be in a document: where the stopcock is, which shutter sticks, who to call about the wall, and why the third bedroom is cold.

The Italian system is conservative and it protects buyers rather well. The transactions that go wrong here mostly go wrong for reasons of behaviour, and the same four appear again and again.

The first is instructing nobody independent. Buyers arrive believing the notary is their solicitor. He is not; he is a public officer acting for the deed itself, and so nobody is checking, on their behalf alone, whether the house as built matches the house as registered, whether the veranda was ever authorised, whether the boathouse concession is in the seller's name and how long it runs. That work belongs to your own lawyer and your own geometra, and the fee for both together is trivial against the cost of discovering the answer afterwards.

The second is the friend of a friend. Somebody in the buyer's own country knows someone with a house on the lake who recommends a person who is excellent, and that person turns out to be excellent at something else. This shore is small and specialised: a firm that handles Milanese apartments competently is not automatically equipped for a protected nineteenth-century villa with a state concession on its frontage and an unregularised terrace.

The third is signing a document you have not fully read because it is in Italian and somebody has summarised it kindly. An accepted written offer already binds you here; the point of no return arrives considerably earlier than buyers from English-speaking markets assume, and it arrives in a document that looks informal.

And the fourth is the sentence we would put above every desk on this lake: we will regularise it later. Sometimes you can, at a cost and on a timetable. Sometimes, particularly where a protected building or the shoreline is involved, you cannot at all, and the discrepancy transfers to you along with the house. Anything unresolved should be resolved by the seller before the deed, or priced properly into it, and never left as a matter of goodwill.

Owning here begins the day after, and what begins is not glamorous. Utilities have to be transferred into your name, which requires the tax code you should already have. Insurance has to be arranged with somebody who understands a lakeside property, which is a narrower field than it sounds. The concession on the water's edge, if there is one, has to be formally moved across, and this is the single most commonly forgotten item on the entire list. Somebody has to receive the post.

Then there is the softer part, which matters more than it should. You have arrived in a village where the person who cuts the garden also cuts three other gardens on the same lane and has done since before you were looking, where the previous family were known, and where you are, for a while, the new people. That is not hostile. The owners who settle here most easily do a small number of unremarkable things: they keep the staff the previous family had, at least for the first year; they learn enough Italian to be embarrassing in it; they pay quickly; and they are present in the village in the low season as well as the high one.

It is worth saying plainly that this is also the point at which the tax position becomes real, and it is a genuinely separate question from the purchase. Whether Italy considers you resident, whether the house is a principal home, and how your own country treats all of it are three different tests with three different answers, and they should have been thought about before completion rather than discovered afterwards. Our guide to Lake Como property taxes sets out the shape; a qualified adviser in both jurisdictions sets out yours.

But the first winter is the thing. Come and spend a fortnight in the house in January, before you have decided what to change. The building will tell you which rooms are cold, where water gets in, what the light does, and whether you have bought a summer house or a house. Everybody who does this makes better decisions in the spring than everybody who does not.