How we present a house for sale in Friuli, from the paperwork to the page

No house goes online before we know what its papers say: the unseen part, which spares everyone surprises at the notary's.

• Energy certificate (APE). It must be available when negotiations open, and its class and indices must appear in every advert: anyone publishing without them can be fined between €500 and €3,000. It lasts up to 10 years if the heating system has had its checks.
• Up-to-date land registry extracts. When the seller is a private individual, the buyer's taxes are usually worked out on the cadastral income, and the registered owner has to be the seller.
• Floor plan and permits. At completion the seller declares that the cadastral data and plan match the house as it stands, or the deed is void; the building permits must be cited as well (for work begun before 1 September 1967 a sworn declaration will do). A glazed-in balcony or a moved wall is better found now.
• Land book. In the 43 municipalities where the libro fondiario covers everything, and in part of Pontebba, ownership passes on registration: we check the house is registered to the seller (the land book).

Municipal figures are measured at the town hall; a house may stand on another side of the valley. So we redo the sums at its coordinates:

• sun: the real horizon from the Copernicus terrain model and the sun's path minute by minute, the same calculation as the house identity card, which anyone can try with their own address;
• travel times by car to the emergency department, the station and the motorway, on OpenStreetMap roads and without traffic, as we state;
• risks: the spot on ISPRA's flood and landslide maps, plus the seismic zone;
• broadband: fixed-line coverage at that point, from the AGCOM map;
• market: the OMI price zone and, where the Revenue Agency publishes them, the municipality's sales.

The house identity card works out only sun and horizon at the exact spot; travel times, risks and broadband we check ourselves, point by point, against the sources above.

In the mountains the spot matters most. Take Tarvisio: at the winter solstice its town hall has 3 h 53 min of direct sun, while points 250 m away have 2 h 55 min to 5 h 7 min, according to the side.

• We work on light, colour and leaning verticals, and remove clutter and objects that are not staying with the house.
• Nothing built is added, removed or bent: no extra window, no shifted beam, no landscape invented in a window that came out white.
• Virtual furniture, where used, is marked as a simulation on the image itself and is never the first picture.
• Every pass through an AI model is recorded in a note at the end of the listing, in every language and on the portals too, which add no labels of their own; where the model changed more than the light, the photo also carries a label on our website.

Before going out, each edited photo is compared with the shot it started from.

• The 3D tour, when the house has one, sits at the top of the page: you walk through room by room on your phone, and someone living beyond the Alps can tell whether to make the trip.
• Floor plans: the cadastral one, cleaned of stamps and personal data, next to the tour's or the architect's. Under the plans we say what they are: a tour plan is not the cadastral plan and has no planning value.
• Room names are those in the papers: an attic stays an attic, even with a bed in it.

Italian, English, German and Slovene, each written for its reader rather than translated: the German reader learns how far Munich is, the Slovene reader how far Ljubljana. Our site, Immobiliare.it and Idealista get different texts carrying the same facts.

No superlatives: if there is a view, the photos show it. A flaw is not hidden: the viewing should hold no surprises.

• The page on our website, with photos, tour and plans, and next to the price the taxes, a sample mortgage instalment and what the notary is likely to charge, on assumptions spelt out in full.
• A PDF exposé, one per language.
• Immobiliare.it and Idealista: in the past year, 79% of our Friuli buyers found us there.
• The group's other websites, when the house suits their readers too.

After each viewing, if the visitor leaves feedback, the owner gets it almost word for word, without the writer's name. The first step: selling your house.