Accountants

This is not a dramatic category, and that is exactly why owners neglect it. Nothing goes wrong quickly; it goes wrong in the third year, when a filing has been missed twice, the comune has been writing to an address nobody reads, and penalties and interest have quietly attached themselves to a sum that would have been trivial to pay on time. The recurring items are unglamorous: the municipal property tax on a second home, which is set and collected by the comune where the property sits and paid in instalments across the year; the local waste charge; and, if the house is let, income to be declared here. Add to that whatever your own country requires by way of disclosure of a foreign asset. None of it is difficult. All of it is deadline-driven, and deadlines are the thing an owner living somewhere else is structurally bad at.

The second theme is residence, which is where the money actually is and where the advice has to be good. Italy determines residence by statutory tests concerning registration with a comune, habitual abode and the centre of a person's interests, and the answer interacts with the treaty between Italy and wherever you are coming from. The consequences of crossing that line are substantial and go well beyond the house: worldwide income, reporting of assets held abroad, and a different relationship with the Italian system altogether. Owners drift towards it accidentally by spending more time here each year, and the ones who get into difficulty are almost always the ones who never asked the question because the house itself seemed uncomplicated. If you are contemplating a move, the conversation to have is with an adviser here and an adviser at home, at the same time, before the year in which it happens.

Which points to the real selection criterion. There is no shortage of competent accountants in Como; there is a shortage of accountants who are used to a client whose main affairs are somewhere else and who will pick up the telephone to that client's adviser at home. A firm that files Italian returns impeccably but treats the foreign side as somebody else's problem produces two sets of advice that do not meet in the middle, which is worse than either alone. The other practical criterion is letting. Short lets on this lake are regulated regionally and municipally as well as fiscally, so the accountant needs to be talking to the same reality as whoever is managing the house and taking the bookings. Note that this is a city trade: the firms are in Como, not in the villages, and there is no reason for them to be anywhere else.