Property audits have become a standard procedure in investment property purchases and are becoming increasingly common in smaller transactions, such as the purchase of an apartment or a plot of land for the construction of a detached house.

In each case it is about checking whether the legal status of the property corresponds to the seller’s claims on the one hand and to the needs of the investor/buyer on the other. Property due diligence consists in collecting and analyzing a great deal of information about the property from various sources in order to identify whether and what risks accompany the purchase of the property. The audits may concern both undeveloped and developed properties of any purpose.

Based on our many years of experience, we offer audits of properties located throughout Poland with scopes tailored to the needs of our clients, including:

• full-scope property audits as part of the investment process,
• audits prepared as an independent, external expert,
• audits of selected scopes (for example, leases in a multi-tenant facility),
• audits limited to key issues concerning real estate, performed most often for persons purchasing real estate for their own needs (plot, house, flat), which we call “small audits”. 

We prepare reports from the conducted research, which take the form of:

• a full, narrative report, or
• the report, which is more and more often chosen by clients, is limited to a discussion of key issues and a description of risks related to the purchase of real estate, as determined by the study.

Trade in real property with an unregulated legal status is very limited and sometimes even impossible. Such properties have a lower value, are difficult to sell or even to donate, cannot serve as collateral for loans, are difficult to invest in and sometimes difficult to let. Unregulated legal status is a wealth of various situations: from doubts about the ownership (reprivatization claims, acquisitive prescription), through problems with encumbrances (“old” mortgages, unexercised easements) to difficulties in using the property.

There are also very different routes to regularisation: from court cases to administrative proceedings to contractual solutions.

Regulation of legal status is a broad term. It may refer to the fact that the land and mortgage register contains outdated or inaccurate entries, but also to disputes between owners as to the manner of using common property or as to who should be allocated the property or a part thereof (how to divide the property). These are also administrative cases resulting from invalid nationalisation or expropriation decisions or from requests to return expropriated real estate which was not used for expropriation purposes. These are also situations arising from fortuitous events, such as death.

We provide our clients with comprehensive support in activities aimed at the legal status regulation of real estate. We have conducted all the following types of cases related to the regulation of the legal status of real estates, however some of them can be conducted contractually and in this respect we offer assistance consisting in the negotiation of contracts (settlements) and the preparation of the relevant documents: