Montenegro

Montenegro's housing market is dominated by individual owner-occupation, with a small private-rental sector and a tiny social-rental tier. The market is structured around individual ownership of houses and flats. New construction has been concentrated on the Adriatic coast, with substantial high-end residential and resort delivery particularly around Tivat, Budva and Herceg Novi. The euro is used as the currency without Montenegro being a eurozone member.

The Centralna banka Crne Gore provides macroprudential oversight. The post-2014 sustained recovery, driven by foreign-investment inflows particularly into the Adriatic-coast tourism economy, has produced sustained coastal price escalation. The 2022-2023 inflation spike and the broader regional energy-cost shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine produced significant cost-of-living pressure but also substantial additional Russian-population inflows to the Adriatic coast.

Podgorica and the Adriatic coast dominate Montenegrin housing dynamics. Budva, Kotor, Tivat and Herceg Novi face the principal tourism-driven housing pressure. The northern Montenegrin mountain region — including Žabljak and the Durmitor National Park area — faces a different question of population retention and seasonal-tourism housing. Cetinje, the historic capital, combines heritage-restoration with a smaller-scale housing market.

The Montenegrin rural-housing question — declining population in many highland villages, substantial vacant stock, and the broader question of how to maintain housing services across a sparse and economically-stressed rural geography — is structurally distinct from the urban and coastal dynamics. The post-1991 internal migration has reshaped the country's population geography, with the Adriatic coast absorbing population from the northern mountain region.

Montenegro's cooperative-housing tradition was present in the inter-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia and continued through the Yugoslav socialist period in the standard Yugoslav building-cooperative form. The 1990s privatisation transferred nearly all cooperative-owned flats to individual ownership, with the cooperative organisations either disbanding or transforming into apartment-owner associations.

Contemporary new cooperative-housing initiatives in Montenegro remain at very early stage. The University of Montenegro urban-studies programme and the broader Podgorica architectural-research community provide the contemporary cooperative-housing seeds. The Sojuz na zadrugi (Cooperative Union) provides limited cooperative-sector coordination.

The Kotor historic-centre UNESCO World Heritage Site restoration programme combines heritage-restoration with sustainable tourism-housing management. The Cetinje historic-capital regeneration combines heritage-restoration with cultural-economy investment. The broader Adriatic-coast tourism-management initiatives — attempting to balance the substantial holiday-rental conversion pressure with long-term residential preservation — represent the principal contemporary policy challenge and the principal experimentation area.

The contemporary Montenegrin cooperative-housing pioneers — small in scale, often emerging from the University of Montenegro and broader Podgorica architectural-research networks — provide the early experimental basis for a different housing model. Together with the EU pre-accession funding for housing-renovation and the broader EU accession-pathway alignment commitments, these projects provide the institutional foundation on which a possible non-market housing tier could be built through the second half of the 2020s.