Buying a house in Gonio or Makhinjauri is not the same transaction as buying an apartment in a Batumi residential complex. In the villages south of the city, you are usually buying a plot with a structure on it, and the paperwork for the two is often in very different states. A surprising number of houses here sit on land with clean title while the building itself was never properly registered, extended without permission, or built under a permit that expired before completion. Check the land and the building as two separate files, and you avoid the resale and mortgage problems that catch out buyers five years later.
Why land title and building permits diverge in Gonio and Makhinjauri
Gonio and Makhinjauri grew organically. Families built a main house, added a second floor for a married son, glazed a veranda, then put up a guest wing when tourism picked up. Each addition may have been fine with the neighbours and invisible to the registry. The land beneath all of it can still have perfect title, which is exactly why buyers relax too early. A clean land extract tells you who owns the plot and whether it is agricultural or residential. It tells you nothing about whether the structure standing on it is legal, whether its footprint matches the plan, or whether the area in the registry equals the area you are walking through.
Makhinjauri adds a second layer. Parts of it fall under coastal protection zones and landslide-risk restrictions, and the rules on what can be built where have shifted over the years. A house that was tolerated in 2009 may not be mortgageable in 2026. Gonio has its own pressure: proximity to the border, the beach strip, and a steady flow of buyers converting family plots into guesthouses. Sellers often price the land and treat the house as a bonus. That framing should make you suspicious rather than comfortable.
The practical consequence is simple. Treat the land file and the building file as two separate due-diligence tracks, each with its own documents, its own risks, and its own negotiation levers. If you only verify one, you are buying half a property.
Checking the land file before you look at the house
Start at the public registry with the cadastral code for the plot, not the seller’s word. You want the extract showing the registered owner, the plot boundaries, the designated use, and any encumbrances such as mortgages, easements, or court claims. Match the owner’s ID against the seller’s passport. If the plot is held by several heirs, every one of them signs or provides a notarised power of attorney. Deals that stall for months almost always stall here, not at the house.
Walk the boundaries with the cadastral map in hand. Fences in Gonio and Makhinjauri drift. A neighbour’s wall may sit a metre inside your plot, or your seller’s extension may sit a metre inside the neighbour’s. Resolve that before signing anything, because a boundary dispute discovered after purchase is expensive and slow. Check the designated use as well. Agricultural land can sometimes be reclassified, but the process takes time and money, and a house built on agricultural land without reclassification is a problem you inherit.
Ask about the coastal and hazard overlays directly at the local municipality in Gonio or the relevant Makhinjauri authority. Confirm in writing whether the plot sits in a protected zone, a landslide-risk area, or a zone with height or density limits. This is also the moment to ask what building permits exist for the plot. The land office and the architecture department are usually in the same building or a short walk apart, and one visit can settle both questions.
If you are comparing this purchase against city options, the Batumi real estate catalogue groups new developments by residential complex, where permits and completion dates are tracked as a package. Village houses do not come with that structure, so the burden of verification sits with you, including any residence permit in Georgia through real estate purchase.
Verifying the building permit, the completion certificate, and what was actually built
Now the structure. Ask for the building permit issued for the plot and the completion certificate, known locally as the acceptance act, that confirms the building was finished in line with the permit. Many houses in these villages have one, the other, or neither. A permit without a completion certificate means the building is legally unfinished, which blocks registration of the structure and usually blocks a mortgage. A completion certificate that describes a 90 square metre house while the seller shows you 160 square metres means the extra 70 square metres are unregistered.
Compare the registered floor plan against reality, room by room. Unregistered extensions are common: a glazed balcony counted as living space, a basement converted into a flat, a separate guest house on the same plot with no permit at all. Each of these is fixable, but the fix has a cost and a timeline. Legalisation of an unauthorised structure in Georgia is possible, but it requires drawings, fees, and sometimes a court route, and the municipality can refuse. Price that risk into your offer or make the seller complete legalisation before the deal closes.
Ask the seller for the technical passport of the building and check its date. An old passport may not reflect later changes. If the seller cannot produce a current one, commission a licensed surveyor to draw an up-to-date plan. It costs a few hundred dollars and it is the single most useful document in the negotiation, because it turns vague assurances into a measurable gap between what is registered and what exists.
Sea view claims deserve the same treatment. In Gonio and Makhinjauri a view can be blocked by a future development on the neighbouring plot. Check the designated use and height limits on the plots between the house and the water before you pay a premium for the view.
For context on pricing, the median across the market tracked by batumi-realestate.com is $1,514 per m², with entry-level property from $13,000, and each listing shows price per square metre and distance to the sea. Village houses trade differently from Batumi apartments for sale in New Boulevard or the Old Town, so use those figures as a benchmark rather than a rule. The site charges 0% buyer commission and lists are updated daily, which makes it a reasonable place to build a shortlist before you travel.
When you have the documents, put the findings into the purchase agreement as conditions. Make the contract conditional on the seller delivering a clean land extract, a valid completion certificate covering the full built area, and registration of the structure in your name. Hold back a portion of the price in escrow until registration completes. Register the transfer at the public registry yourself rather than relying on the seller’s agent, and keep notarised copies of everything. If a document is missing, the seller fixes it or the price drops to reflect the cost of fixing it. That is the whole discipline: two files, two checklists, one signature only when both are clean.