Selling a home in Piacenza: the complete guide from mandate to deed

Selling a home is not just a matter of finding a buyer and agreeing on a price. It is a sequence of steps — documents, timing, costs, taxes, the notary's role — that stays the same for every property, even though each sale has its own variables. This guide follows the whole path, from the moment you decide to sell to the moment the deed is signed. The first step, and the one most often underestimated, is paperwork. Before the listing even goes online you need the energy performance certificate (attestato di prestazione energetica, or APE): by law the energy class has to appear in every advertisement, so it must be ordered from a qualified surveyor well in advance, not scrambled together at the last minute when a buyer is already ready to sign. You also need the cadastral record (visura catastale), which confirms the property's data and registered owners, and the cadastral floor plan (planimetria catastale), which must match the actual layout of the place. This is where the most common obstacle hides. A floor plan that no longer matches the home — a wall moved, a balcony enclosed, a room laid out differently from what the land registry shows — has to be regularised before the deed, not discovered halfway through a negotiation. A surveyor can check it in a few hours by comparing the plan with the actual layout, and it is worth doing straight away: finding a discrepancy when the buyer already has mortgage approval means chasing deadlines, and often losing the sale. Alongside the cadastral check comes the planning one: that any works carried out over the years — an extension, a change of use, even a veranda enclosed without authorisation — are covered by the correct permits (CILA, SCIA, a building permit, or the older licenza edilizia for properties built long ago). Without that cover the notary cannot proceed to the deed, and putting it right through a sanatoria takes time: the earlier it is tackled, the less it risks stretching out the negotiation. If the property is part of a condominium, add the condominium rules and the latest approved accounts, which the buyer is entitled to see before committing — not least because they will inherit any extraordinary works already voted through. If the property came through an inheritance, the simple deed of provenance is replaced by the declaration of succession (dichiarazione di successione) and, if it has not been done yet, the cadastral transfer (voltura catastale). For a plot of land, finally, you need the planning designation certificate, which states what the land may be used for. Before any of those documents, though, there is one decision worth taking carefully: who to entrust the sale to, and under what kind of mandate. An exclusive mandate commits you to selling through a single agency for its duration, in exchange for a real commitment to promoting the property; a non-exclusive mandate leaves the door open to several agencies at once, but often dilutes the attention each of them gives to that specific property. Neither is always the right answer: it depends on how much you trust the agency you pick, and on how much it matters to you to have a single point of contact answering for the whole process. Once the mandate is signed, the visible phase begins: photographs, the listing, handling enquiries and viewings. These steps look purely operational, but they are not. Photos taken with the right light and the room in order, and a listing that states real data — cadastral square metres rather than eyeballed estimates, condominium charges declared — attract fewer curious visitors and more genuinely interested ones. Every viewing that goes nowhere for no clear reason is time added to the sale, so it pays to qualify whoever asks to see the property before booking an appointment, not after. When an offer arrives it is rarely at the full asking price, and this is where a well-handled negotiation makes the difference. Knowing in advance what the real margin is — how much of the asking price is market value and how much is room to negotiate — avoids two opposite mistakes: accepting an excessive cut out of fear of losing the buyer, or digging in on a figure the local market does not recognise. Here too, the area data published on this site is the most solid reference: the average gap between asking price and final price actually observed in that area is not a concession, it is simply the market. How long a sale takes, from mandate to deed, varies considerably with the area, the type of property and the asking price — the very variables that make a single figure for the whole of Piacenza misleading. Average selling times, and the typical gap between asking and final price, calculated area by area from OMI valuations, the FIAIP observatory and our own records, are published on the "Quanto vale casa a Piacenza" page and on the pages dedicated to individual neighbourhoods. Those numbers, rather than a generic average, are the correct starting point for estimating the timing of your own property. The factor that weighs on timing more than any other, though, remains the asking price. A correctly priced property attracts interest in the first few weeks, while the listing is still new; an overpriced one sits online for months, accumulates viewings that lead nowhere, and when the price finally comes down it comes down from a weaker position, with viewers wondering what is wrong with it. The condition of the property counts too: small interventions before viewings — a wall repainted, a room cleared of excess belongings — help people picture the place as their own far more than they might seem to. On costs, the seller pays less than the buyer. The main item is the agency commission, which at Idea Immobiliare is due only once the deed is signed: nothing upfront, nothing for photos, listings or viewings. To that add the APE, if one is not already available, and — only where a mortgage is still registered against the property — the cost of having it removed, which should be discussed with your bank a few weeks before the deed rather than handled at the last minute. If the outstanding mortgage has not yet been repaid, the bank needs time to calculate the exact amount due and to start the procedure for removing the charge, which formally completes only some months after the deed — although, as far as the sale is concerned, what matters is that the mortgage is repaid out of the proceeds, at the same moment the buyer pays the price. It is worth telling your bank that you intend to sell as soon as you sign the mandate, not once an offer is already on the table: a lender's administrative timings rarely compress on request. Transfer taxes — registration, mortgage and cadastral tax, or VAT when buying from a construction company — are almost always borne by the buyer, not the seller. It is a common misunderstanding, and worth clearing up early to avoid a wrong estimate of what the sale will leave you with. The same goes for the notary's fee: by established practice the buyer chooses the notary and pays for them, although nothing stops the parties from agreeing otherwise in particular cases. The tax that really concerns the seller is the one on the capital gain: the difference between the sale price and the purchase price (plus the costs incurred in between, such as a documented renovation). As a general rule it applies only if the property is resold within five years of purchase and was not used as a main home — yours or a family member's — for most of that period. Where it applies, you can choose between ordinary taxation (the gain is added to your other income and taxed at the ordinary progressive rates) or a flat substitute tax, applied directly by the notary at the deed on request, which saves having to declare it the following year. Rates and thresholds can change with budget laws: the exact calculation for your case, and which of the two options is genuinely better, should always be checked with an accountant before the deed, not after. There is one case in which the capital gains tax normally does not apply at all: a property received through inheritance and later resold falls outside the ordinary calculation that applies to a purchase. That difference matters most to people handling a sale after a succession, often with other things already running in parallel — agreements between heirs, costs accruing on an empty property while everyone decides what to do. Here too, confirmation for a specific case belongs to whoever handles the declaration of succession, not to this guide: inheritance situations often carry their own variables (co-ownership between several heirs, properties not yet transferred at the land registry) that deserve a dedicated check. The notary enters the process before the deed, not only on the day of signing. They verify the property's cadastral and mortgage position — that there are no charges, seizures or discrepancies preventing the transfer — prepare the deed, read it to the parties before signing, and register it. A notary is an independent public official, not the lawyer of either side: their verification protects the validity of the sale for both, and it is one of the reasons why, in Italy, a property sale without a notary simply does not exist. The path to the deed starts with a written purchase proposal, usually accompanied by a caparra confirmatoria, a deposit which the seller keeps if the deal falls through because of the buyer, and which must be returned twofold if it is the seller who pulls out. Once the proposal is accepted, the parties move to the preliminary contract — the compromesso — which must be registered and which fixes the price, terms and final conditions of the sale, including any suspensive conditions such as the buyer obtaining a mortgage. Between the compromesso and the deed, a few weeks usually pass, sometimes a couple of months: the time the buyer needs to finalise a mortgage, and the parties to gather the last documents the notary asks for. On the day of the deed the notary reads the act aloud, the parties sign, the buyer pays the balance of the price and the seller hands over the keys. From that moment ownership has formally transferred, and only the practical steps remain: transferring the utility contracts (electricity, gas, water) and reporting the change of owner for IMU and TARI, which would otherwise keep being billed to the person who has just sold. A common mistake, particularly when several non-exclusive mandates are running at once, is not keeping track of who actually introduced each prospective buyer. If two agencies present the same property to the same person, the commission goes to whichever can prove it first, and without a clear record of viewings the matter can turn into an argument that has nothing to do with the sale itself. This, as much as the quality of the promotion, is why a single agency with a clear mandate tends to simplify more than adding channels complicates. One last distinction, because it frequently causes confusion: the valuation an agency provides in order to set the asking price is not the same thing as the appraisal the buyer's bank will commission later, if a mortgage is involved. The first exists to work out what price to bring the property to market at, looking at real transactions in the area; the second exists so the bank can decide how much it is willing to lend, and is typically more conservative. A gap between the two does not mean someone got it wrong: they are two different questions, asked for different purposes. Knowing that in advance avoids surprises when the bank appraisal lands, possibly with the negotiation already well under way. Having a single point of contact through all of these phases — from the first conversation about documents to the signing at the notary's — reduces the room for surprises exactly where they concentrate: the match between floor plan and actual layout, the timing of a mortgage, the choice between ordinary and substitute taxation. If you are thinking of selling and want to start from the right figure for your area, our valuation by phone is free and carries no obligation.