What actions need to be taken after purchasing an apartment? Lawyer's answer

Registration of transfer of ownership

Previously, the DCTs themselves were registered, but now registration of the transfer of ownership is required. This is done by Rosreestr, but documents can also be submitted through the MFC. It doesn’t matter what kind of apartment is being sold: on the secondary market or in a new building.

Registration procedure

Step by step order:

The parties sign the agreement.
Payment is made.
A transfer and acceptance certificate is drawn up.
Documents for registration are submitted. If you decide to contact the MFC, it is recommended to make an appointment in advance on the official website of the department. This way you won't have to wait your turn.

An application for transfer of ownership will be processed within 5-12 working days.

The new owner receives an extract from the Unified State Register of Real Estate, in which he will already be indicated as the owner.

Important! The issue of move-in date is decided by the seller and the buyer at their own discretion. If no one lives in the apartment, you can move in on the day of signing the agreement or after registration. This is not regulated by law. If the owner did not have time to move, he can agree with the buyer to postpone the move for several days. The date by which housing must be vacated is indicated in the contract.

Documentation

To re-register ownership in a standard (free) transaction you will need:

Passports of the parties to the transaction.
Constituent documents of the seller-legal entity, if the property is purchased from the developer.
Contract of sale. It is drawn up in at least three copies, one is given to the registrar, then returned to the new owner with a note about registration.
Power of attorney, if a representative acts on behalf of the buyer or seller.
Explication.

A document confirming the basis for the emergence of ownership rights from the seller is required.

For example, another DCT, gift agreement, exchange, etc. Without it, the registrar will not accept the application. In addition, even before signing the contract, you need to check the purity of the transaction and make sure that the seller legally owns the apartment.

Note! On the day of entering into a transaction, the seller must submit an extract from the house register and a certificate of absence of debts for housing and communal services. They can be ordered at the MFC. The extract confirms the absence of registered persons in the living space. If you buy an apartment with registered citizens, especially children, it will be extremely problematic to register them.

State duty

Individuals pay a fee of 2,000 rubles, legal entities - 22,000 rubles.

Documents after registration

After registration, the new owner must receive from the MFC or Rosreestr an extract from the Unified State Register, where he will be indicated as the owner, as well as a written document with a registration mark. The last document must be kept: in the event of a subsequent sale, it will definitely be needed.

Sample statement

Who pays the costs?

Help from a lawyer or notary costs money. For legal support of transactions, lawyers usually charge from 5,000 to 20,000 rubles. The parties distribute such expenses at their own discretion.

As for the state duty, it is paid by the buyer - the new owner.

What should you do after you have bought real estate on the secondary market?

The necessary actions after purchasing real estate on the secondary market have a certain sequence of implementation.

Where to go to legalize property ownership?

First you need to register ownership of the purchased apartment . To do this, you need to contact the local branch of the Federal Registration Service, which collects and stores information about the rights to all real estate in a particular region.

You will need to collect the following documents:

Passports of each participant in the purchase and sale transaction.
The sales contract itself.
Receipt of payment of the state fee for registration of rights.
Power of attorney (in the case where a proxy is involved).
Technical passport for the apartment.
Completed application for registration of property rights.

Sometimes the registrar may require additional documents to confirm some information. It is best to find out this during preparation to avoid problems. The following additional documents may be required:

If the apartment was common property, then consent from the seller’s spouse will be required.
If a minor or incapacitated citizen participates in the transaction, permission from the guardianship and trusteeship authorities will be required.
If the apartment is mortgaged or encumbered with rent, then consent from the mortgagee or rent recipient will be required accordingly.

Typically, a certificate of title is prepared within one calendar month. And after that, the purchased apartment becomes the property of the new owner.

When and how can I register?

Registration is also an important step after purchasing an apartment. Unless, of course, it was bought for the new owner to live in, and not, say, for rent by other residents.

How long does it take to register for a new home? From the moment you receive the certificate of ownership, you must obtain a residence permit within one week . Otherwise, the new buyer may be fined up to two and a half thousand rubles.

Receive registration:

at the passport office;
in the MFC;
It is possible to submit an application through the state portal. services online.

Algorithm of actions:

To begin with, you should check out from your previous place of residence. In general, this is not necessary if the registration is in the same city - the person will be immediately discharged when applying for a new registration. But at the same time, the whole procedure may take a long time, and some passport offices may unlawfully require you to sign out yourself. Therefore, it is advisable to check out in advance to avoid such problems.
What to do next? You must submit a completed and signed application on Form No. 6. For minor children under 14 years of age, this is done by parents or legal guardians.
The following documents must be submitted along with the application:
When registering children, provide their birth certificate.
Document on ownership of the apartment.
Foundation agreement.
Departure sheet, in case of independent discharge from the previous place of registration.
After this, a day will be set for receiving the passport with the new registration.

Reference! If you are discharged prematurely, you can be registered in a new apartment even a day before. And after receiving your passport, it will already have a stamp indicating registration of the purchased apartment.

How to re-register personal accounts in the RCC?

Another need will be to contact the cash settlement center. There you need to re-register personal accounts in the name of the new owner of the apartment. For this you will also need a certificate of ownership of the apartment and a passport. You must submit an application to the RCC to re-register your personal account using the details of the new owner .

After re-registration, it will be advisable to take an extract from your personal account. And in the future, if erroneous payments occur, the owner will be able to easily prove that there are no outstanding payments.

Re-registration of utilities to yourself

After registering a personal account with the RCC, it is advisable to immediately address issues regarding utilities.

First, you need to contact the management company or homeowners association, where you need to draw up a service agreement.
Now you need to contact each of the utility supply companies. First, you should contact the energy organization and re-issue the energy supply contract to the new owner of the apartment. If gas is supplied to the apartment for use with a stove or water heater, then the same should be done at the city gas service.
Next, you should contact the water utility and re-register them. In addition, it is worth finding out the date of their last inspection, and if more than 3 years have passed since the last one, then it is advisable to authorize an unscheduled inspection. This will allow you to forget about it for the next few years.
If you have a landline telephone in your apartment and want to leave it, you need to contact the Rostelecom branch at your place of residence. You can also connect a telephone line there if you don’t have one. The same applies to television/Internet, but you need to contact the appropriate provider.

Contacting the Federal Tax Service to declare purchased housing

The tax return gives access to a property deduction for the apartment - 13% of its value. This money can be spent on many important purposes related to real estate and such an opportunity should not be neglected.

You need to submit the declaration along with other documents to the tax authority itself. When can this be done? There are no time limits for filing 3-NDFL in this regard; you can submit it on any convenient day and there will be no refusal.

Do I need to contact a notary?

If desired, the parties can contact a notary to sign the contract. Registration of the transfer of ownership in this case will take much less time - only one day. The notary submits documents to Rosreestr independently in electronic form.

Sometimes notarization of a written contract is required by law:

If shares in ownership are sold. An exception is the sale of a share to another owner or the alienation of shares by all owners at the same time: in this case, it is not necessary to contact a notary.
If a property is sold with a lifetime annuity.
When selling the home of a minor or incapacitated person.

Important! If the DCT is certified by a notary, this will speed up registration and minimize the risk of challenge. The notary independently checks the legal purity, because bears property liability.

Art. 17 “Fundamentals of legislation on notaries”

How to terminate an apartment purchase and sale agreement before or after registration of rights?

The act of acceptance and transfer of the apartment under the purchase and sale agreement

Housing deduction

What should you do after buying an apartment? Property owners who officially pay 13% personal income tax can request a tax deduction. When purchasing housing without a loan, the maximum payment reaches 260,000 rubles, and in the case of a mortgage - 390,000.

First you will have to cope with all the previously listed tasks. Next, the citizen must contact the local tax authority. You will have to have with you:

income certificates;
passports of all home owners (and their birth certificates);
application for a deduction;
contract of sale or mortgage;
statements about the transfer of money for the operation;
marriage contract and marriage certificate (if available);
details of the account to which you would like to receive money;
tax return in form 3-NDFL.

This should be enough. An application for a tax deduction is usually processed within 2 months. About 60 more days are allotted for the transfer of money for the transaction.

Important: the Federal Tax Service may refuse the deduction on legal grounds. The refusal is provided in writing with justification for a particular decision.

If the deal is alternative

Alternative means a transaction in which several participants:

The seller of real estate and its buyer.
The second seller who purchases the apartment of the first.

The transfer of ownership rights under alternative transactions is registered at one time. Having signed the DCP, the parties need to come to the MFC with documents and submit applications for registration. After this, several buyer-sellers immediately become owners of different real estate properties.

Issues with utilities

It is very important to re-register personal accounts for the purchased property as soon as possible. The issue with the provision of utilities usually does not need to be resolved; they continue to be supplied regardless of what happens to the housing (unless any systems were previously turned off for non-payment by the previous owner). However, problems will arise with payment if you do not issue invoices in your name in a timely manner. To do this you need:

Submit an application to the cash settlement center with a request to re-register the owner of personal accounts (when submitting an application, it is advisable to ask for an extract on the status of the debt in order to check or make sure that it does not exist);
Sign an agreement with service companies or with the manager, if all payments go through it;
Conclude a new agreement with the institution providing energy resources, as well as the company responsible for supplying gas (relevant if the property was purchased on the secondary market);
Check existing metering devices (meters) and renew contracts similarly to the previous paragraph;
If there is a landline telephone on the premises, you need to come in person to the territorial branch to re-register your personal account.

If the apartment was purchased with a mortgage

If the property was purchased with a mortgage, there will be an encumbrance on it until the debt is repaid.
It cannot be sold, donated or exchanged without the bank’s consent. But sometimes people cannot cope with payments or are looking for other housing, and the apartment with encumbrances has to be sold. Signing a contract for such real estate is possible only after full repayment of the debt. Before this, the parties must enter into a preliminary agreement with a deposit in the amount of the balance of the debt. The mortgage is repaid and the encumbrance is removed in three working days.

After concluding the main DCT, the parties only need to submit documents for registration. But sometimes it happens differently:

for example, when the encumbrance is not removed, but the mortgage is issued to the buyer. In this case, the procedure depends on the policy of the mortgage bank.

How to conclude an agreement with the HOA?

The HOA or organization of apartment owners is responsible for:

establishing communication with housing and communal services;
cleans and maintains the area in front of the house;
keeps records of all residents of the house, as well as other necessary information;
deals with minor disputes related to the property of the house and its surroundings.

The management organization is a legal entity and is responsible for fulfilling its duties. Employees of this organization receive a fee for this, which is specified in the contract concluded with the people who live in the house.

A homeowners' association is a non-profit structure; its employees are the people who live in the house. They can dispose and manage the property that is assigned to the house, establish communications and enter into agreements with utility companies. All activities of such an organization are regulated by the general agreement of all citizens who live in the house.

The residents of the house themselves can choose such an organization. Also, if an agreement with a commercial organization has already been drawn up by developers, residents of the house have the right to refuse their services in favor of their own HOA.

It is precisely such an organization that can help and assist a new resident of a house to correctly conclude contracts with organizations that provide the house with utilities.

In order for a new tenant to be able to use the entire list of necessary services, he should enter into agreements with the following organizations:

water utility;
the company that supplies the home with energy;
organizations that deal with waste removal from the territory of the house and nearby;
with an organization that supplies the house with gas.

To apply for an agreement with such organizations, you must prepare a package of certain documents. It is also necessary to write an application requesting the installation of appropriate meters.

If an apartment or a child’s share is sold

Selling real estate to minors is complicated by obtaining permission from the guardianship authority. First, preliminary consent is given for the alienation of the child’s home, and it does not guarantee that permission will be given at the final stage.

Important! The main condition for conducting real estate transactions for children is the allocation of shares or the purchase of at least equivalent living space. Without this, permission will not be issued.

When the DCT is signed, the parent who sold the child’s property needs to confirm that the guardianship authority has fulfilled the request to provide other housing. If you purchased another property, you need to provide an extract from the Unified State Register of Real Estate. If it is decided to transfer money to a bank account, an account statement for the child is provided.

Taxes after selling an apartment

The buyer does not have to pay taxes, because he spends his own money to buy an apartment, and does not receive benefits. Personal income tax is paid by the seller on the profit from the sale.

Sellers are exempt from personal income tax if the period of ownership of the sold apartment exceeded 3 years, and it was received as a result of one of the following transactions:

Inheritance or donation.
Privatization.
An annuity agreement with lifelong maintenance and dependency.

In other cases, the minimum tenure is 5 years. If the seller is exempt from personal income tax, he only needs to submit a 3-NDFL declaration to the tax service before April 30 of the year following the date of the transaction. If no tax exemption is due, it must be paid by July 15th.

We undergo technical inspection

This point is not relevant for everyone. You need to undergo a technical inspection if the vehicle diagnostic card has expired. If the card is valid, then there is no need to reissue it: a change of owner does not affect it.

You can find out whether the car was serviced by the previous owner from the avtocod.ru report by reading the “Technical Inspection” block.

An MTPL policy can be issued even on the last day of the maintenance period. If the period has expired, you will have to service the car yourself. This can be done at specialized technical inspection stations.

You can undergo MOT in any region of Russia, regardless of your place of residence. For inspection, in addition to the car, you will need a passport, PTS or registration certificate. The cost of a technical inspection, depending on the region, ranges from 300 to 1,000 rubles. You make payment at the station.

Also read: Car technical check: step-by-step instructions

Tax deduction for the new owner

When purchasing real estate, the new owner can take advantage of a tax deduction if he is a personal income tax payer.

What expenses are deducted for:

Construction or purchase of real estate.
Paying off mortgage interest.
Repayment of interest on loans taken to refinance a mortgage.

The maximum amount of expenses for calculating the deduction is RUB 2,000,000. Even if the housing was more expensive, everything from this amount will be calculated.

Important! The deduction is not provided if the purchase was paid for by maternity capital, budget funds or the employer.

Is it possible to terminate a purchase and sale agreement?

If the DCP has not yet been submitted to the registrar, it can be terminated. It is enough to draw up an additional agreement to it, but the mutual consent of both parties is required. If the agreement is submitted for registration, but the transfer of ownership is not registered, the parties can revoke it.

If ownership has already been registered in the buyer’s name, it will not be possible to terminate the contract peacefully. By law, the contract is considered to have already been fulfilled, but a reverse contract can be drawn up, where the parties switch places: the former buyer will act as the seller, and the seller will act as the buyer. As for personal income tax, you will not have to pay it if you indicate in the new DCT the price at which the property was originally sold.

Note! If there are disputes between the parties, it is worth going to court to terminate the contract.

Problems that may arise after purchasing a home

Situations may arise when it is necessary to dispute ownership of real estate. This situation arises if, when purchasing part of the apartment, the owner transferred it to an outsider, and not to the priority applicants. If the seller owns only part of the living space, he is obliged to notify the remaining owners of his plans to sell. This gives the remaining owners the opportunity to buy out this part of the living space within a month.

If such an operation is not carried out, then the remaining owners have every right to apply to the judicial authorities with an application to re-register the sold part of the living space in their name. In such a situation, the new owner of the home will not be able to defend his rights. Therefore, before completing all documents after purchasing part of the living space and before concluding an agreement, it is necessary to check the consent for such operations from the remaining residents of the house.

If housing is purchased with a mortgage, then before it is fully paid, the owner of the new apartment may face a number of encumbrances, of which he will be notified in advance.

Lawyer's answers to frequently asked questions

I paid a deposit to pay off the seller's mortgage, but he refused to proceed with the deal. What to do and how to get the money back?

If a preliminary contract is drawn up, it must indicate that the seller undertakes to sign the main contract within the established time frame. You need to go to court to conclude the main contract: by a court decision, the seller will be forced to do this.

The second option is to refuse the transaction due to the seller’s refusal, and to collect the deposit in double amount. But if the seller has already spent the money, he will pay pennies according to the writ of execution. It is better to insist on concluding the main PrEP.

How to check if ownership is registered?

To check, just use this service by entering the application number.

Can a representative act on behalf of the seller or buyer?

Yes, but only with a notarized power of attorney (Article 185.1 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation).

From what date must the buyer pay for utilities if the contract has already been signed, but the ownership has not yet been registered?

Housing and communal services are paid from the moment the transfer and acceptance certificate is signed upon moving into the apartment. It should also record meter readings.

What to do if the contract is lost after signing?

If documents for registration have not yet been submitted, it is enough to issue a new copy of the agreement. If the property right has already been registered, you need to request a duplicate from Rosreestr or from a notary. You can submit an application on the Rosreestr website.

Register

If you do not have permanent registration, register. To do this, within 7 days from the date of check-in, you can choose to contact:

any convenient MFC;
passport office of the Criminal Code (if there is one);
passport department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs;
on the State Services website.

For staying without registration for more than the period allowed by law, violators face a fine of 2,000 rubles.

Also, with a new registration it will be easier to apply to the nearest state authorities. institutions.