Software for upravitelji in Croatia

Croatia rewrote the rules for apartment buildings: the Law on the Management and Maintenance of Buildings has applied since 1 January 2025. Since 2025 a Croatian apartment building is a legal person in its own right — the community of co-owners — with its own name, its own address and its own tax number, able to contract, to sue and to be sued.

Any legal or natural person registered for the activity of real-estate management may be a building manager in Croatia. The law sets no license, no examination and no qualification level.

Croatian law requires the manager to make emergency repairs possible every day of the year, around the clock, and to secure an emergency repair within three hours of it being reported.

The manager must open and keep a separate account for each building and run each community's business apart from its own accounts — and if the manager goes bankrupt or is enforced against, the building's money is out of reach.

In Croatia a management invoice is itself an enforcement instrument. The manager does not need a judgment first: it files on the invoice, and the debtor receives a payment order with an eight-day deadline. Croatian law charges default interest on late payment automatically: the European Central Bank reference rate plus three percentage points where a consumer is involved, reset every six months.

Croatia now runs two national public registers for apartment buildings, both kept by the State Geodetic Administration and both filed electronically: a Register of Communities of Co-owners and a Register of Building Managers. The manager files into both: the community within 90 days of taking over the building and changes within 15 days, its own register entry within 90 days and changes within 8 days.

Every Croatian building has two years from 1 January 2025 to conclude a new inter-owner agreement and a new management contract, and the old ones cease to apply at the end of that period.

The co-owners' representative (predstavnik suvlasnika) is elected by the co-owners with a majority of more than half, meaning more than 50% of the co-ownership shares. If the person elected is not a co-owner, a spouse, a partner or informal partner, or a direct-line relative of a co-owner living in the same building, the decision needs a two-thirds majority. Majorities are measured by the co-ownership shares entered in the land register or, where shares have not been determined, against the building's total value area. The representative convenes the co-owners' meeting and signs the management contract with the manager on the co-owners' behalf, and the manager delivers the maintenance programs to him and the annual report to the co-owners through him.