What the rules do to a foreign buyer

Read them side by side and the shapes differ more than the severity does. Singapore prices a foreigner out with a 60% duty but lets them buy. Canada and Australia forbid the purchase outright and then carve exceptions by building size, by map coordinate, or by visa. Thailand permits the purchase but caps it per building, so the constraint is availability rather than cost. New Zealand tests residency and control rather than nationality, so a passport settles nothing. Japan places no nationality test at all and puts its one review regime on location and size.

Not all of them were written against a foreign buyer, and the difference is not cosmetic. 81 name a foreigner, a non-national or a non-resident as the trigger. 22 are general in text and asymmetric in effect: Norway requires the King’s permission for a purchase by anyone, and the exemptions are a spouse, a close relative, or a holder of odelsrett — allodial right. A foreigner has none of those, so a rule that mentions nobody is the one they cannot get around while many Norwegians can. The remaining 39 bind every buyer alike and are here because someone buying from abroad still meets them.

The distinction matters for what a buyer can do about it. Where the trigger is nationality, changing vehicle rarely helps and sometimes makes it worse — Brazil and Russia both reach through a locally incorporated company to the people controlling it. Where the trigger is residence, as in Denmark, the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is a fact about the buyer that can change. Recording 61 of 142 rules as something other than “aimed at foreigners” is the difference between a list of grievances and a list a person can act on.

A screen that reported these as one “restrictiveness” number would destroy the only information in them. A 60% tax and a 49% building quota are not two points on a scale — they fail a buyer in different ways, at different stages, and one of them cannot be solved with money.

That count is the sentence above, made countable. It had been an argument on this page since the layer shipped and was not a field on any rule, so nothing could filter on it, total it, or apply it to a case. Switzerland put the point most sharply when its holiday quota arrived: an exhausted quota means refusal rather than a higher price, which no tax-shaped rule on this screen could express.

The three kinds fail differently even among themselves. A prohibition is settled and you can read whether you are inside it. A quota is not about you at all — eligibility turns on what other foreign buyers already did. And a permission is the only kind another party can end after you have acted on it, because the authority that grants it can attach conditions or withdraw them.

24 of these 142 rules do not look at your passport at all. They test where you live, so a citizen of the country can be caught by living elsewhere and a foreign national can escape by living there. In Switzerland, Denmark and Malta the residence test is what decides whether the purchase may happen at all, which is why an EU passport settles nothing there. A further 20 apply both tests. New Zealand requires a buyer to fail both before its restriction reaches them. Cyprus tests nationality: EU/EEA citizens are outside its permit rule regardless of residence or use.

42 bind everyone, locals included, and that is the category most easily misread as an absence. Norway’s concession requires the King’s permission of any buyer; the asymmetry is entirely in exemptions — a spouse, a close relative, the allodial right — that a foreign buyer has none of. A rule that never mentions foreigners can bind them harder than one that does.

25 of the 33 rules here that speak to what holds the title exist to close it. Whether a company gets around a restriction is the first question anyone asks about every entry on this page, and until now the page could not answer it — the answer was in the instruments and not in any field, so nothing could count it. Canada prohibits a purchase made “directly or indirectly”. Peru’s border zone reaches holdings “individually or in partnership” and forfeits them to the State. Switzerland tests a controlling interest in a Swiss-registered entity and then spends a separate limb on anyone acquiring “for the account of” a foreign non-resident. Russia catches a Russian company once the foreign share of its charter capital passes half. New Zealand consents at 25% owned or controlled. Brazil says it outright: incorporating locally does not move a non-resident into the permitted class.

The other 8 run the same way. 4 exist because a vehicle is used and not otherwise — the United Kingdom’s annual charge on an enveloped dwelling, which the same house held by a person does not attract, and Singapore’s 65% on a purchase held on trust. 4 charge a different amount depending on the holder, and both rise rather than fall with the structure: South Africa withholds 7.5% from a natural person, 10% from a company and 15% from a trust, and Japan’s single exemption from its 10.21% withholding belongs to an individual buying a home, so a company has none. Not one rule published here is removed by putting an entity in the way.

29 of these 142 rules turn on what the property will be doing, not on what it is. That is a different question from the asset class, and this ledger carried only the second until now. Both Swiss rules govern the same kinds of property and reach opposite answers: Switzerland states the axis itself, saying the distinction its Act draws is “between property that is used and property that is held”. Cyprus’s former secondary-residence distinction was repealed in 2011; its permit now turns on nationality, not what the property will be doing.

7 of them decide whether the purchase may happen at all rather than what it costs. 7 turn on the property being the base of a trade rather than an investment: Switzerland requires no authorisation where it serves as a business’s permanent establishment, and Malta excludes from secondary-residence treatment anything “required for carrying out that person’s business activities or supply of services”. Land held as the base of a working business is a category the law already keeps separate.

4 turn on the property doing nothing, which is a use and not the absence of one — Australia’s vacancy fee wants 183 days occupied or genuinely available for rent, and Canada taxed housing that was vacant or underused. Both are escaped by living in it and by letting it alike, so an owner who has decided neither is inside both. Spain is the exception that matters: it taxes a non-resident’s unlet home or office on imputed rent, and living in it does not escape that — letting it, or using it in the owner’s own business, does. The other 113 rules here do not distinguish, and that records what these entries say rather than what their instruments contain.

29 of these 142 rules cost more than money to get wrong. Malta voids the deed “for all purposes of law and in regard to all persons”, which reaches everyone downstream and not only the parties. Peru forfeits property inside its fifty-kilometre border zone to the State. Cyprus leaves a signed contract conferring no right to acquire until a permit issues, so money can move and the buyer still owns nothing. Every one of those is filed under the same kind of constraint as Denmark, where being wrong means submitting an application.

15 of these 142 rules put the duty on somebody other than the person they are about. The American entry says so in its own title — the buyer withholds on a foreign seller, not the seller — so a rule filed under selling is an obligation you carry when you buy. Two more land on a tenant: an owner meeting “20.42% withheld on rent” reasonably concludes they will be paying it, and they will not. What falls on them instead is a separate duty to appoint a tax representative, at a different time and in a different place on the page.

The practice behind 139 of these 142 rules has not been checked. A rule states what the law says and not whether it is applied, and the two come apart in both directions — a formal restriction nobody enforces, and an open market a buyer cannot actually reach. Where a source does say, it is recorded: Australia funded screening alongside its ban and says the regime is actively policed; Norway’s concession is general in its text and, in its own words, one a foreign buyer cannot step around while local buyers can. Everywhere else this is the absence of a statement rather than a clean bill.

9 entries here are the opposite: a published statement that a restriction a reader would reasonably expect does not apply. Japan operates no nationality test at all; Switzerland exempts commercial premises and Serbia exempts residential letting from VAT. Absence of a rule and a rule saying there is no rule look identical on a screen that cannot tell them apart, and only one of them is evidence.

Each entry is read from the statute, the tax authority, or the land registry, never from a summary. Where official sources disagree — and on three of these markets they do, about a date or about a measurement basis — the disagreement is stated in the entry instead of being resolved by picking whichever source sounded most recent.

Facts of law change. The date each entry was read is the only honest way to say how old it is, so it sits in the table rather than in a footer. Entries are read again every 90 days, and this page counts itself against that rather than asking to be believed: the oldest entry here was read 61 days ago, and none is overdue. A promise about maintenance that nothing measures is the same defect as a rule with no source, and this one went unmeasured from the day the layer shipped.

3 of these entries carry, in their own text, a date on which this page stops being true — 2 dates between them, the first 2027-03-31. Australia’s ban is published as binding a purchase made today and its enacted window ends on 31 March 2027; the extension that follows it is published as announced and not yet law, and commences the next morning. On two consecutive days both statements become false, and nothing about the data changes — which is exactly why a reader could not be expected to notice. The build fails on those dates instead. None has passed.

That mechanism has a limit worth stating. A build that never runs cannot fail, so a published artifact left alone would go on serving the same sentences. What the dates in the table do without any build at all is let a reader see the window and decide for themselves, which is why they are printed next to every rule that has one rather than being held for the machine.