Villas and detached houses for sale in Sarandë, Albania

Detached houses and villas for sale in Sarandë ask a median of €300,000, or €1,339 per square metre of living space; half of them sit between €249,000 and €400,000 and the cheapest start around €140,000. A square metre of house asks less than a square metre of apartment in most of Albania; the total is higher because the house is three to four times the size and comes with a plot. The full set of houses for sale in Sarandë includes terraced and semi-detached houses as well.

In Albanian, vilë is the everyday word for any detached house, so a listing that says villa is not promising a pool and a sea view; it says the building stands on its own. 18% of the villas listed are still under construction, almost always in a developer's gated complex sold from plans; the rest are existing houses, from new family villas to older houses in villages and on the edge of towns.

Sarandë has few detached houses for sale: older family houses in the upper streets of the town and on the road to Ksamil, and a handful of new villas on the headlands, nearly all with a sea view because the town is built on a slope. Plots are small and the house is priced on the view and its condition.

The plot first: a foreigner buys a house and its land directly when the plot is classified as construction land, which is the normal case for a villa in a complex or a house in a town, while agricultural land is held through a company or a lease, so the cadastral classification decides what you can sign. Then legalisation: a house built or extended after 1991 without a permit needs its legalisation completed before it can be transferred cleanly. Then the finish: a price per square metre far below the local median usually means a shell with no windows or connections. Our guide to house prices in Albania gives the medians by town and our due diligence guide lists the documents; for a villa bought from plans, read our guide to buying off-plan in Albania first.