Digital Property Passport

What the digital passport is

Every property has a position. What it is exactly according to the Cadastre and according to the Land Registry, what was built and under which licence, which territorial protections reach it, whether the habitation certificate and the energy rating are still in force, where the water comes from and where the waste water goes, whether it can be let to holidaymakers and under which category, what it is taxed on and what has been declared, and what condition it is in. That position exists whether or not anyone has ever looked at it.

The Digital Property Passport is the file that establishes it. A single structured document about the property — not about its owner, because the history belongs to the land and outlives changes of ownership — bringing together eleven sections and up to seventy-five checks, legal, fiscal and technical, each with its document, its status and the date on which it was checked.

The part that is worth paying for is not storage. It is that our firm verifies: that each document is authentic, that it is in force, and that what it says matches the official register it came from, recorded with the date on which we checked.

What you have it for

For your own peace of mind. Knowing what you hold, what is missing and what does not add up, without depending on memory or on a folder of loose papers split between the notary, a municipal archive and a drawer somewhere. An owner who lives abroad cannot watch over a country property from another country; what they can have is its position documented and current.

For the moment it has to be shown. An inheritance, a change of ownership, a purchase or a sale, a bank asking for paperwork, an insurer reviewing a policy, a town hall faced with proposed works. All of those moments call for much the same thing: the documentation gathered, in force and checked. Assembling it in a hurry is precisely when problems appear — and when they get expensive. Having it done turns weeks of chasing into an access you grant and revoke.

The passport does not replace the checks each party has to carry out in a particular transaction, nor the advice of whoever is handling it. It puts what exists on the table, ordered, verified and dated.

The eleven sections

1. Physical and legal identity — cadastral record, land registry extract, title deed, graphical coordination, and the comparison of surface areas.
2. Ownership and charges — holders, shares and regime; mortgages, easements, seizures, resolutory conditions; outstanding tax charges over the property.
3. Planning and building legality — original building licence, first-occupation licence, later alterations, what was declared against what was built, land classification, disciplinary files.
4. Territorial protections — municipal heritage catalogue, listed buildings and their protected surroundings, island-specific heritage and environmental protections, ANEI/ARIP/AANP, Natura 2000, coastal easements and public paths, flood and fire risk.
5. Habitation and energy performance — habitation certificate, registered energy performance certificate, building evaluation report.
6. Utilities, installations, water and drainage — well concession or registration, septic tank or treatment plant discharge authorisation, water origin, electrical and gas installations, pool, lift, self-consumption systems.
7. Tourist use — Balearic tourist registration and places, responsible declaration, position of the place in the island quota, municipal zoning, category, penalty files, community rules on tourist letting.
8. Owners’ association — certificate of payment status under article 9.1.e LPH, statutes and internal rules, participation share, recent minutes, approved levies and pending works, community insurance.
9. Occupation and tenancies — occupation status, tenancy agreements in force, deposit lodged with the IBAVI, pre-emption rights, occupation without title.
10. Tax and economic — IBI receipts and no-debt certificate, cadastral value and reference value, local taxes, filed returns, acquisition date and value.
11. Upkeep, claims and health — building book, age and principal works, condition report, live LOE guarantees, insurance policy, claims history, asbestos, buried fuel tanks, legionella and lead.

Not every property needs all eleven, and no engagement uses all seventy-five checks. What matters is that the ones you do not contract are shown as not checked, with the same visual weight as the rest.

Two things that are often overlooked

The well and the septic tank. Many island properties irrigate and fill swimming pools from wells whose administrative position has never been examined, and treats waste water through septic tanks with no discharge authorisation. On a country property, this is worth more than everything else put together. The passport establishes whether there is a concession or registration in the Water Registry, what flow is authorised, whether the discharge is authorised and whether the system matches the volume actually produced.

Registered, cadastral and actual surface areas. They rarely coincide. The passport sets the figures side by side and states the difference, along with where it comes from. A discrepancy does not prevent you owning or using the property, but while it stands, the Land Registry and the Cadastre are describing different properties — and correcting it has an order of steps that is worth knowing before, not during, anything else.

What verified means

Three levels, and the difference between them is deliberate.

Provided. The document is in the file. Nothing more is claimed about it.

Verified. Our firm has checked, on a stated date, that the document is authentic, that it is in force, and that what it says is consistent with the official source. This is the ordinary work of the passport, and it is the level at which discrepancies come to light — because comparing a document with its source is what reveals that the registered surface does not match the cadastral one, or that the licence does not cover what was built.

Opined. A legal or technical judgement about suitability, risk or consequences, signed by the lawyer or technician who takes responsibility for it. It is separate work, commissioned separately.

Verification is always tied to a date, and that date belongs to the individual point rather than to the file as a whole: each entry carries the date on which it was checked. It is a statement about a document and its source at a moment in time — not a statement that the property is in good order. Where you want to read how our firm frames the scope of that work and the professional responsibility behind it, that is set out at palliser.es.

The passport also carries a documentary accreditation grade, expressed as a percentage. It measures the documentation accredited for the property; it is not a rating of the property, of its state of repair or of its value. It does not fall because of what we find — a property with a documented and verified planning discrepancy has a high grade, precisely because everything is on the table — and what has not been contracted is removed from the base rather than counted against you.

What expires, and when

Part of what the passport establishes is not permanent: fifteen of the seventy-five checks correspond to duties on the owner that fall due on their own. That is why the passport is maintained rather than issued once. The periods below are the general rule; the applicable period for a particular property can differ, and the passport records the one that actually applies.

A passport that is kept current tells you what has expired and what is about to. Where an obligation has lapsed, the passport records it — detecting a lapse is not the same as resolving it, and putting a document back in force is separate work with its own timetable, which depends on third parties.

How it is shared

The passport is consulted online, in a single viewer, under a password. There is no open link and no address that can be guessed.

• You decide which sections travel. A section you hide is not sent: it does not appear in the recipient’s index and it leaves no gap, because sections and points are renumbered over what is actually sent.
• Access is named and identified, granted to a specific person, with an expiry date, and revocable by you at any time.
• Every access is logged — who, when, and which sections. The log provides dated evidence of what was made available to whom and when, without predetermining the evidential weight it may carry in a particular case.
• The name and email of whoever is looking are watermarked across the page. It is a deterrent rather than a technical barrier: no system can prevent a screenshot, and we do not claim otherwise. What it does mean is that a copy in circulation can be traced back.
• Documents that contain third parties’ personal data, such as community minutes, are anonymised before anyone other than you sees them.
• Everything is hosted on our own servers, not on a third-party platform.

What the passport is not

It is not a valuation, and it says nothing about what the property is worth.

It is not an opinion that the property is sound, habitable or capable of being regularised. It records what the documents say and whether they match their source.

It does not replace the checks that fall to each party in a particular transaction, nor the advice of whoever is handling it. It is the ordered starting point, not the end of the work.

It does not make an irregularity go away. Where something is not in order, the passport says so plainly and dates the finding; putting it right is separate work, it can be commissioned from us or from anyone else, and no one can guarantee how an administration will respond or when.

It does not cover what has not been contracted. Points outside the engagement are shown as not checked, and the absence of an entry against them means nothing has been looked at — not that there is nothing to find.

It is not, in itself, a document issued or endorsed by any public authority.

Related services

The passport draws on work we already do for non-resident owners. The source documents live in document management, while questions of title, planning and tourist letting are handled through legal services.