You have found a flat you like. The photos are good, the price looks reasonable, and someone is replying quickly and in decent English. This is the point where most foreign buyers in Georgia start moving fast, and it is the point where the money is actually at risk.

A listing is an advertisement. It is written by whoever wants to sell the property, and nothing in it has been checked by anyone before you read it. That is true of every property site in every country, ours included. What follows is the short list of things worth establishing before you send anything.

What a listing proves, and what it does not

A listing tells you what someone is asking for a property. That is the whole of it.

It does not establish that the person you are talking to owns the property. It does not establish that the property exists in the shape described. It does not tell you whether a bank has a registered claim over it, whether there are unpaid utility debts attached, or whether the seller is one of four siblings who inherited it and the only one who wants to sell.

None of that means a listing is dishonest. Most are not. It means the listing is not evidence, and the things that would cost you money are exactly the things a listing has no way of showing.

Be careful with trust markers

Property platforms often mark some listings as verified, trusted, or premium. It is worth knowing what that word is doing.

Usually it means the account has been checked in some way, or the listing has been reviewed for obvious spam, or in some cases simply that the advertiser is on a paid plan. Those are all reasonable things for a platform to do. None of them is the same as confirming that the named seller is the registered owner of that specific property and that nothing is registered against it.

We show a verification badge on our own listings, and we would say the same thing about ours: check it yourself anyway. A badge is somebody's assurance. The register is the record.

Sanity-check the price before you get attached

Georgian asking prices vary far more than newcomers expect, and a foreign buyer has no instinct for what is normal in a given district. Before you get emotionally committed to a flat, look up the median price per square metre for that district and compare.

We publish a monthly price index covering every district of Tbilisi and Batumi, computed from live listings and free to use. It will not tell you whether one specific flat is fairly priced, because condition and floor and view all matter. It will tell you whether you are being quoted something in a different universe from the local rate, which is the mistake worth avoiding.

If a price is far below the district median, that is not a bargain to move quickly on. It is a question to ask.

Get the cadastral code before anything else

Every registered property in Georgia has a cadastral code. It looks like 01.13.08.005.014.

Ask for it early, and ask in writing. A seller or agent dealing with a real property they are entitled to sell will have it and will hand it over without drama. Reluctance, delay, or an explanation of why it is not necessary yet is the most useful signal you will get in the entire process, and it costs nothing to test.

The code is also worth understanding rather than just holding. It encodes the region, the parcel, and critically whether you have been given one flat or the whole building sitting on that parcel. We wrote a guide to reading a cadastral code, and the section on the segments after the parcel number is the one that has cost people real money.

Check the register

Georgian law is unusually helpful to buyers here. Ownership of real estate is established by registration with the National Agency of Public Registry, and the register is public. Not the contract, not the listing, not the seller's account of things. The register.

With a cadastral code you can establish, free and without an account:

  • who is registered as the owner today
  • whether a mortgage is registered against the property
  • whether there are liens or other encumbrances
  • whether the code covers the individual unit or the whole building

You can run that on our registry checker, which reads the public record directly. If you would rather go to the source yourself, our walkthrough of the NAPR process covers it. We genuinely do not mind which you use. We mind that it gets done, because it is the step that separates a safe purchase from a hopeful one.

Questions worth asking a seller

Once the register agrees with what you have been told, a short list closes most of the remaining gaps:

  • Is the registered owner the person I would be signing with, and if not, what is the relationship and is there a power of attorney?
  • Are there other owners with a claim, through inheritance or marriage?
  • Are utility bills settled, and can I see recent statements?
  • For a new build: what is registered today, the land or the individual unit?
  • What exactly is included in the price, and is the finish specified in the contract?

Vague answers to specific questions are information.

Where a lawyer belongs

A registry check tells you what is true today. It does not draft your purchase agreement, structure the payment, or handle the transfer.

For a straightforward resale where the register is clean and the owner is present, Georgian purchases are genuinely simple by international standards. For anything involving off-plan property, inheritance, multiple owners, a power of attorney, or money moving before registration, engage a Georgian lawyer. It is a small cost against the size of the transaction, and it is the other half of doing this properly.

The short version

Look at as many properties as you like, wherever you find them. Enjoy that part.

Then, before money moves: get the cadastral code, check the register, compare the price against the district, and read the contract with someone qualified. The risk in a Georgian purchase is almost never that you saw too few listings. It is that you saw a good one and took it at face value.