In the Philippines, and as is common in most Asian countries, direct ownership of ground by a foreign person or business entity is not permitted. In other words, if you want to purchase a lot for the purposes of building, you would normally be limited to two choices. Purchase the ground in the name of your Filipina wife or partner, or form a business (costly) in which you are legally limited to the maximum of a 40% interest, and register the ground in this entity’s name.
Obviously, these arrangements are far from ideal and leave the buyers in a precarious position. Should a buyer or their partner decide to end the relationship, the buyer has no rights over the ground, and although some foreign buyers are savvy enough to have the physical building in their name, any ensuing legal tussle often ends in favor of the Filipino.
It’s one of the few headaches of living in the Philippines and one that affects all of us. Essentially, the safety of your investment into the country is dependant on the strength of your relationship with your wife or partner, and once the honeymoon is over, some find themselves homeless and penniless, after pouring their life savings into building a home here.
Finding a better way – Go East PTL
To offer foreign buyers complete peace of mind Go East has developed a Purchase to Lease contract, essentially a 75 year lease that affords you as much legal right to land as is possible under Filipino law. In effect, it means a foreigner can transact directly for the ground we sell, with the flexibility to convert their lease into a full title (through their Filipino partner) at a later date, should they so choose.
To read up more on the laws that govern foreign property ownership in the Philippines we recommend reading the following article.
Our PTL contract offers you complete protection and in the event of death, rights can be assigned to foreign or local heirs. We also ensure that your rights to ownership of any structure erected on ground leased under our PTL agreement resides with you. One of our driving goals in creating Go East was to offer foreigners wishing to retire or live long term in the Philippines, a safer, more secured route to building a home here, without the usual accompanying risks.
Design and Build with Confidence
Once you’ve secured your ground, you can start designing your dream home. We offer a number of design templates on the site and you can assess these and alter them to suit your specific needs, or even start from scratch with our team of qualified architects. The templates have been created to give you an indication of price point for different builds. These prices are reflected alongside each design.
We opt for roofing and steel trusses in our designs, only incorporating slabs for ground and intermediate floors. If you’ve any experience with a concrete slab for roofing, you will know these are notoriously hard to seal properly against water ingress, and to reduce risk of collapse in the event of a major earthquake, we far and away prefer a normal roof and truss system to the added weight placed on the structure by additional concrete.
Once you’ve settled on a design and committed to building, our team will assist with planning permission and the complexity of hiring a reliable building contractor. We have specific contractors who build our homes and we offer our home owners the benefit of the most protective building contract in the Philippines. We’ve got you completely covered and you can sit back and worry about finding the ideal furnishings and fittings for your new home while we deal with the day to day stresses of building a home.
Our system won’t suit everyone of course, and to accommodate foreigners looking to settle here in areas we don’t operate in, (Mindanao, for instance) we have developed an extensive library of articles to help you make the process of settling here as painless as possible, from common pitfalls to avoid, to the complex process of securing ground and building. You can access these articles for free and we’d highly recommend taking heed of the advice they offer if you are new to the Philippines.Â
Please do reach out to us if you’ve found any information in the articles to be outdated or if the area you live in has conflicting requirements.Â