Plomba in the Czech land register: what the P means when you buy

You pull the property's record from the online register the evening before you sign. A letter P sits next to the flat. The agent says it is nothing. The law says someone has filed something.

A plomba is the marking the Czech cadastral office places on a property by the next working day after a filing, to show that its recorded rights face a pending change. The owner is told within a day, and no transfer can be entered until 20 days after that notice, so the P is a warning and a clock.

When does the office set a plomba, and who is told?

Section 9 of the Cadastral Act, zákon č. 256/2013 Sb., requires the cadastral office, when a proposal or another document for registering rights arrives, to mark at the affected properties, no later than the following working day, that the rights are affected by a change. The same section gives everyone the right to inspect the list of received proposals, and fixes the order of registrations by the moment a proposal was delivered. Section 10 adds that the legal effects of a registration arise at the moment the proposal reached the competent office, which is why the date on the plomba matters more than the date of the eventual decision.

Section 16 turns the marking into a message. No later than the day after the change, the office informs the owner and any other entitled person by post to the address in the register or through their data box, and, if the owner has asked for it, also by e mail or by text message. Owners who use the office's change monitoring service are informed through that service instead.

Why does the entry wait at least 20 days?

Section 18 sets the pace. Where the conditions are met, the office permits the registration, but at the earliest after a period of 20 days from the day the section 16 notice was sent. Read together, the two sections give an owner who never signed anything at least 20 days between the letter and the entry. Once the registration is made, the office notifies the parties of what was entered, and where a party whose rights end or shrink was represented, it notifies that party directly as well as through the representative.

The decision itself is hard to undo. Section 18 allows no appeal, review or reopening against a decision permitting the registration, while a rejection can only be challenged by a court action filed within 30 days of delivery. A further filing on the same property is suspended while that period runs.

What does a P mean for a buyer?

That a proceeding is open and you do not yet know whose. The public list of received filings under section 9 tells you the type and the date, and the seller's own copy of the notice under section 16 tells you the rest. A plomba from the seller's mortgage bank releasing its lien is routine before a sale; a plomba from a filing the seller cannot explain is a reason to wait for the proceeding to close, because section 9 orders registrations by delivery time and yours would queue behind it. The Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre, ČÚZK, charges a fee of 2,000 Czech crowns for each proposal to register a right, as its table of administrative fees sets out, so every P on a record represents a paid filing by someone.

What the record itself must show before you file is covered in our guide to the výpis z katastru.

How do you watch a property for changes?

ČÚZK runs the Služba sledování změn, a change monitoring service that automatically informs a user when a plomba is marked, a registration or record is made, or a note is entered on a monitored property. It is open to anyone holding a real right in the property or party to a proceeding on such a right, delivers through a data box, e mail or text message at the user's choice, and the fee schedule sets 200 crowns a year for up to 20 properties and 10 crowns per property a year above that. Once you own, it is the cheapest way to make section 16's letter arrive as a message you will actually read the same day.

Check the record for a P the day you sign, not the week before, and ask the seller for the notice behind any plomba you find. AiMYNDi reads the výpis and flags a pending proceeding next to the price.