Can a Foreigner Buy Property or Land in the Philippines?

TL;DR: A foreigner cannot own Philippine land directly. You can own a condominium unit outright if the project stays under a 40% foreign ownership cap, lease private land for up to 99 years as a registered foreign investor, or co-own land through a Philippine corporation that is at least 60% Filipino-owned. Inheriting land from a Filipino relative is the one direct exception, and using a Filipino nominee to fake compliance is a criminal offense.

The constitutional rule that decides everything

Article XII, Section 7 of the 1987 Constitution states: “Save in cases of hereditary succession, no private lands shall be transferred or conveyed except to individuals, corporations, or associations qualified to acquire or hold lands of the public domain.” Section 2 of the same article limits who is qualified: Filipino citizens, and corporations or associations that are at least 60% owned by Filipino citizens, measured in capital, voting rights, and beneficial ownership.

Read together, these two sections are the reason every real estate conversation with a foreign founder in the Philippines starts the same way: land itself is off the table for a foreign individual or a foreign-majority company, full stop. This is not a licensing requirement you can apply for around, and it is not a rule the Department of Trade and Industry or the SEC can waive administratively. It sits in the Constitution, so changing it takes a constitutional amendment or, as happened with leasing in 2025, a new law that works within the existing ownership ban rather than against it.

Everything else in this guide is a foreigner working around that single sentence through one of a small number of legal channels: buying a condo unit instead of land, leasing land instead of buying it, holding land through a Filipino-majority corporation, or inheriting it. There is no sixth option, and no lawyer or broker who tells you otherwise is giving you real advice.

Condominium units: the one form of real property foreigners can own outright

The Condominium Act, Republic Act 4726, carves out the exception that makes Philippine real estate accessible to foreign buyers at all. Section 5 of the Act allows a condominium unit to be conveyed to “Filipino citizens, or corporations at least sixty percent of the capital stock of which belong to Filipino citizens, except in cases of hereditary succession,” and it extends the same right to unit ownership by natural persons regardless of citizenship, subject to the aggregate foreign-ownership limit on the project as a whole.

In practice, this works out to a 40% cap: no more than 40% of the units or the total floor area in a given condominium project can end up in foreign hands, whether that is foreign individuals or foreign-majority corporations. The remaining 60% has to stay with Filipino citizens or Filipino-majority corporations. The cap is not a personal quota. It is a building-wide ceiling that the developer or condominium corporation is legally responsible for tracking.

A few mechanics matter here that generic guides skip:

• What you actually own. Buying a condo unit gives you a real property title to that unit plus a proportionate, undivided share in the common areas and the land the building sits on, held through the condominium corporation. You are not buying the land directly; you are buying a share of a corporation that holds it, structured so the unit ownership and the corporate share transfer together under one deed.
• The cap is enforced at the point of sale. A developer that has already sold 40% of a project’s units or floor area to foreign buyers legally cannot sell you the next unit as a foreigner, even if you have cash in hand and the developer wants the sale. Ask your broker or the developer’s sales office for the project’s current foreign-ownership percentage before you sign anything. If a developer cannot produce that number, that is a warning sign, not a technicality.
• Resale carries the same restriction forward. If you buy a unit from another foreigner, that transaction still counts against the same 40% ceiling; you are not adding new foreign exposure, but the corporation still needs to verify the project has not crossed the cap through other transactions in the meantime.
• Townhouses and horizontal developments are usually not condominiums. A “condo-titled” townhouse project structured under RA 4726 can qualify, but a standard subdivision house-and-lot package sits on land title, not condominium title, and the 40% rule does not rescue a foreigner trying to buy one.

Long-term leasing: the route for anyone who actually needs land

If your business needs a warehouse footprint, a factory site, a resort parcel, or any other project that has to sit on raw land rather than in a condominium, leasing is the legal path. This is where Philippine law changed materially in the last year.

The original Investors’ Lease Act, Republic Act 7652, allowed a foreign investor to lease private land for an initial term of up to 50 years, renewable once for a further 25 years, for a maximum of 75 years across both periods. On 3 September 2025, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed Republic Act 12252, amending RA 7652 to replace that two-stage structure with a single consolidated lease term of up to 99 years. The law’s implementing rules took effect 4 January 2026, so as of this writing, a qualifying foreign investor can sign one lease and hold it for up to 99 years without a separate renewal application.

Qualifying is not automatic. To lease under this law, you need one of the following:

1. An approved and registered investment under the Foreign Investments Act of 1991 (RA 7042).
2. Registration under the CREATE Act or the CREATE MORE Act, the Philippines’ tax-incentive regimes for registered enterprises.
3. Compliance with the requirements of the relevant investment promotion agency for your project, such as the Board of Investments or the Philippine Economic Zone Authority.

A few conditions apply on top of the term itself. The leased area has to be used for the registered investment, sized to what the project reasonably requires, and it stays subject to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law and the Local Government Code, so agricultural land and land use zoning still constrain what you can lease and for what. Tourism projects carry an added floor: a minimum investment of USD 5,000,000, with 70% of it committed within three years of signing the lease, under the original RA 7652 terms that RA 12252 did not remove. The lease contract also has to be registered with the Registry of Deeds, and the President can shorten the term below 99 years on the recommendation of the Fiscal Incentives Review Board for projects touching vital services, critical infrastructure, or national security.

Leasing does not give you ownership, equity, or a path to eventual title. At the end of the term, the land reverts fully to the lessor. What it does give you is bankable, transferable, long-term control of the site, which for most operating businesses is functionally what they need.

Holding land through a Philippine corporation: the 60/40 structure

The third channel is corporate. A domestic corporation that is at least 60% owned by Filipino citizens qualifies to hold land under Article XII, Section 2. A foreign investor can take up to 40% of that same corporation’s equity and, through it, share in land the corporation owns.

This is a legitimate structure, used routinely by real estate developers, agribusiness operators, and manufacturers who need a fixed site rather than a lease. It only works, however, if the 60% Filipino side is real: actual Filipino citizens or Filipino-majority entities who paid for their shares, vote them, and receive their proportionate share of profit and control. The 40% foreign shareholder gets the economic and governance rights that come with 40%, not the practical control of the company.

This is exactly where the Anti-Dummy Law, Commonwealth Act 108, becomes relevant. The law was written to catch the workaround that this structure invites: a foreigner who wants land but does not want to share real control puts a Filipino name on 60% of the shares while quietly funding those shares, holding a side agreement for the dividends or voting rights, or arranging for the “shareholder” to sign whatever the foreigner directs. If the Filipino shareholder is a nominee in substance rather than a genuine investor, the corporation’s land ownership becomes a dummy arrangement, and the arrangement is void from the start. Both the foreigner who benefits and the Filipino who lent their name face imprisonment and fines under the Act, and the land itself is exposed to forfeiture. See our full breakdown of how the Anti-Dummy Law actually gets enforced before you structure anything this way.

The honest test is whether you would be comfortable if your 60% Filipino partner exercised the full weight of their 60%. If the answer is no, the structure is not a landholding corporation. It is a dummy arrangement waiting to be discovered, usually during a bank loan review, a due diligence process for a sale, or a tax audit.

For businesses that want land control without touching this risk at all, a fully foreign-owned corporation under the 100% foreign ownership route combined with a long-term lease under RA 12252 gets you a comparable operating footprint without a Filipino co-owner in the capital stack.

Inheritance: the one direct exception, and it is narrower than people think

Article XII, Section 7 opens with “save in cases of hereditary succession,” which means a foreigner can end up owning Philippine land as an heir. This applies specifically to succession under the law, meaning a Filipino citizen dies and the foreigner is a legal heir who receives the land either because there was no will (intestate succession) or because a will simply follows the legal order of heirs rather than trying to grant land to someone who would not otherwise inherit it.

What this exception does not cover is worth stating plainly, because it is the mistake people actually make:

• You cannot buy land from a living relative to use this exception. It only applies on death, through the operation of succession law, not through a sale or donation while the Filipino owner is alive.
• A will cannot manufacture the exception for a non-heir. If Philippine succession law would not have made you an heir anyway, naming you as a beneficiary of land in a will does not create a hereditary-succession right, because the transfer would not be “hereditary succession” as the Constitution uses the term. Testamentary gifts of land to a foreigner outside the legal order of succession run into the same constitutional ban as any other conveyance.
• A foreign heir can hold the land but faces the same restriction on transferring or developing it as any other constitutionally restricted owner would, and many foreign heirs choose to sell the inherited land to a qualified Filipino buyer within a reasonable period rather than hold it indefinitely, partly to avoid ambiguity about long-term use rights.

There is a related but separate path for a specific group: former natural-born Filipino citizens who later naturalized elsewhere and are now technically foreign nationals. Under Batas Pambansa 185 and Republic Act 8179, a former natural-born Filipino can acquire private land directly, not through inheritance, up to defined area limits: 1,000 square meters of urban land or one hectare of rural land for residential use under BP 185, and 5,000 square meters of urban land or three hectares of rural land for business or investment purposes under RA 8179. This is not available to a foreigner who was never a Filipino citizen. If you were born Filipino and later took another nationality, confirm your status and the applicable limit before assuming the general foreigner rules apply to you.

Comparing the five paths

When this actually matters for setting up a business

Most foreign founders reading this are not trying to buy a personal residence. They are deciding how to secure premises for a company, and the property question tends to surface at one of three points.

Choosing where to operate day to day. If you only need office or retail space, you almost never need to own anything. A commercial lease as a tenant, whether the landlord is a Filipino individual or a corporation, carries none of the ownership restrictions in this guide because you are not acquiring an interest in the land itself. Save the analysis above for cases where the business specifically needs a titled asset, not routine office space.

Deciding whether to lease or build for an operations-heavy business. A logistics company, manufacturer, or agribusiness that needs a purpose-built facility usually compares two real options: lease the land under RA 12252 and build on leased ground, or find a genuine Filipino-majority partner and co-own the site through a landholding corporation. Leasing is faster to set up, does not require you to find or vet a Filipino equity partner, and avoids Anti-Dummy exposure entirely, at the cost of never holding title. The corporate route gives longer-term asset appreciation to whoever holds the 60%, which in this structure is not you, so run the numbers on what you are actually gaining before choosing it over a lease.

Buying property personally, tied to your visa or residency plans. A founder relocating with a long-term visa often wants to buy a home rather than rent indefinitely. A condominium unit under the 40% cap is the direct, legally clean way to do that as an individual. Do not let a broker push you toward a house-and-lot package “structured” through a corporation or a Filipino spouse’s name unless you have had that specific structure reviewed, since house-and-lot land title carries the full constitutional restriction that condo title does not.

Every one of these decisions turns on facts specific to your project: the activity itself, how much capital you are deploying, whether you have a real Filipino partner or none at all, and how long you need the site for. This guide tells you which doors are open. It is not a substitute for having a lawyer confirm which one fits your actual deal.

This guide is general information, not legal advice on your specific facts. Book a consultation if you want a fixed-scope review of your property or leasing structure before you sign anything.