Mozambique

Registering Property in

Mozambique

Listed below is a detailed summary of the steps, time and cost involved in registering property, assuming a standardized case of an entrepreneur who wants to purchase land and a building that is already registered and free of title dispute.

The information appearing on this page was collected as part of the Doing Business project, which measures and compares regulations relevant to the life cycle of a small- to medium-sized domestic business in 183 economies. The most recent round of data collection for the project was completed in June 2011.

  • Standard Property Transfer

  • Property Value: MZN 683,432.45
  • City: Maputo

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No. Procedure Time to Complete Associated Costs
* 1 Obtain a Real Estate Registry certificate of the property from the Real Estate Registry Office

A Real Estate Registry certificate is obtained at the Conservatória do Registo Predial. The certificate shows all the owners of the property/ beneficiaries of the use and benefit right, and is valid for 90 days. If the owner does not have a copy of the current real property registration, then the DCU reference number must be obtained in order for the Registrar to locate the book and page on which the property is registered.


Agency: Real Estate Registry (Conservatória do Registo Predial) 		7 days (simultaneous with procedure 2) MZN 75
* 2 Obtain a certificate from the Tax Authority regarding the value of the property

A certificate (registro matricial) with the value of the property is obtained from the tax authority or Repartição das Finanças.

Agency: Tax Authority (Repartição das Finanças) 		7 days (simultaneous with procedure 1) MZN 100
3 Lawyer prepares the draft sale and purchase agreement

A lawyer prepares the sale and purchase agreement. It is necessary to have the underlying land and property title deed and real property registration in order to have all the necessary property description and land plot demarcation details. The form of the description varies from rural areas to municipalities. The actual sales instrument is relatively simple but the additional administrative/registry detail complicates the preparation.
10 days MZN 12,000 – MZN 30,800
4 Payment of transfer tax (SISA) at the Municipal Tax Office

The property must have been registered for real property taxes (municipal or national), all of the real property tax must have been paid (for which a tax clearance must be obtained), and the owner and the purchaser must be registered for tax purposes (NUIT).
A SISA tax receipt is obtained to be submitted with the sale and purchase agreement to the notary and the name of the buyer is registered with the Tax Office.
The SISA tax has been reformed by Decree 46/2004 of October 27, cutting it from previous levels around 10%. In the past, the 10% tax that applied to Maputo was not fully paid since the market value of the property was never quoted. This change unifies the level of the transfer tax with the rest of the country that already had taxes around 2%.

Agency: Municipal Tax Office 		7 days 2% of property value (SISA-transfer tax) + 20% of the transfer tax (municipal charge-‘adicional autarquico’)
5 Submit the draft sale and purchase agreement to the public notary to verify and issue the notarial deed of purchase

The lawyer/parties submit the draft sale and purchase agreement to the public notary, who verifies the documentation and prepares the notarial deed of sale and purchase for signature. The Real Estate Registry certificate and the SISA payment certificate must be submitted, together with Companies' Registry certificates of the parties and copies of the ID's of their representatives who will execute the notarial deed on their behalf. Copies of quota-holders/directors resolutions and/or powers of attorney may also be required pursuant to the relevant companies' articles of association. In some cases it may be possible to notarize the deed faster if the parties, instead of the notary, prepare the deed themselves and give it to the notary on a disk to notarize.
2 days 0.2% of property value (stamp duty) + Notarial fees according to the following schedule: 0.4% of property value up to the first MZN 5 million + 0.01% of property value for the excess of MZN 5 million.
6 Apply for registration of the building at the Real Estate Registry Office

The notary deed of sale and purchase is submitted to the Real Estate Registry Office, together with an application requesting the registration of ownership over the property, on the buildings and of the right of use and fruition over the land, in the name of the buyer. Simultaneously with the request for registration (or sequentially depending on the practice), a certificate of the registration is requested, usually an integral certificate which provides the owner with copies of the pages on which the title is recorded.
This is a cautionary measure in the event that the registry books are damaged or destroyed (as happened in the 2000 floods) or disappears somehow.

Agency: Real Estate Registry 		7 days Registration fees according to the following schedule: 0.4% of property value up to the first MZN 5 million + 0.01% of property value for the excess of MZN 5 million.
* 7 Submit the notarial deed at the Municipal Tax Office

The notary deed is submitted to the Municipal Tax Office by the parties, together with an application requesting the registration of the buyer as the owner of the property for purposes of Municipal Property Tax Registration.

Agency: Municipal Tax Office 		7 days (simultaneous with procedure 8) MZN 150
* 8 Submit the notary deed to the Cadastre Services Registry

This procedure is to register the land (use) in the name of the buyer. The notarial deed is submitted to the Cadastre Services Registry by the parties, together with an application for registration of the property in favor of the buyer, to update the Cadastre. If there is a land use and benefit title, the amendment of the title is requested. The new owner's name is registered inside the title document as is the cross-reference to the Real Property Registry recordings.

Agency: Cadastre Services Registry 		7 days (simultaneous with procedure 7) MZN 150
* Takes place simultaneously with another procedure.
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