Albania – Changes for the Better

For years, Albania sold itself with a simple promise: sea, sun, and prices lower than Croatia.

Then came the second layer of the same story: the map, the register, the paperwork, and the question of whether any of it really matched.

That is why the EU for Property Rights programme was created. It is an EU-backed reform of Albania’s property rights system, funded through pre-accession support. The first phase received €5.7 million, the second €10 million. The programme is run by the EU Delegation in Albania, and its main Albanian partner is the State Cadastre Agency, the country’s public land and property authority.

Its purpose is very concrete: improve the quality of property-rights data, complete registration where it remained unfinished for years, digitise title deeds, maps and supporting records, connect the system with other public databases, and build a more reliable picture of who owns what land and on what basis. Albania also merged previously fragmented institutions into one State Cadastre Agency, so that the whole process would finally have one centre of responsibility.

That says a lot about how the market looked before. Albania had not one problem, but several at once: old titles, incomplete first registration, paper maps, legalisation of informal buildings, restitution, compensation claims, and plot boundaries that could exist one way on the map, another way on the ground, and a third way in the documents. The European Commission has described this area in plain terms: unclear ownership, overlapping boundaries, measurement errors, and data that has needed correction for years.

Today, the situation is clearly better. In its 2025 report, the Commission said that 91% of land had already been registered, 43% of title deeds had been digitised, 69% of supporting documents, and 10% of cadastral maps. In the same report, it added the warning that matters most: around 80% of previously registered data still awaits verification for accuracy. The same report also points to the two problems that still matter most: unclear ownership and overlapping property boundaries caused by inconsistent interventions and faulty measurements from earlier decades.

That is where the buyer’s part of the story begins.

On the secondary market, the main risk usually sits in the history of the title. The buyer sees an entry, a parcel number, a map, and assumes the matter is closed. In reality, this is exactly where older properties tend to pull old boundaries, inconsistent data, measurement errors, paper maps, and titles based on older documents back into the light. It is a market where one document can look clean while the history behind the plot looks much less comfortable.

On the primary market, the weight shifts lower, under the building itself. What matters most is the land, the project’s consistency with cadastral data, the legalisation status, and whether the developer can really lead the buyer to a properly settled legal title in the end. The European Commission still points to legalisation as a major unfinished process, with completion expected by the end of 2028. For someone buying a new apartment, that is a very practical point: a new building and a new sale do not always mean a simple legal position.

That is why this EU programme matters to a buyer even if the buyer never reads a single page of European Commission paperwork. The programme shows the direction. Albania is cleaning up the system, improving the data, strengthening the register, digitising the maps, and modernising the cadastre. These are real and necessary changes. At the same time, every individual transaction still needs to be checked on its own merits, because improvement of the system and safety of one specific property are not the same thing.

That is where TPG steps in.

On the secondary market, we check whether the title, the map, the boundaries, and the plot history form one coherent legal picture. On the primary market, we look at whether the land, the project, and the developer’s paperwork really lead to a title that can safely be transferred to the buyer. Our work does not stop at the reassuring sight of “an entry in the register.” Our work is to check whether that entry is backed by a legal position strong enough to survive the next sale, financing, and the normal life of the property.

Albania is genuinely moving in the right direction. That is exactly why buyers should look carefully. In a market that is still being cleaned up, the best decisions are made by people who can see the difference between a better system and a safe transaction.