The Owner's Course · Module 6

Legal, Permits and Foreign Ownership

Every island sits inside a legal system that existed long before your interest in it and will outlast your ownership of it. This module maps the three postures states take toward foreign buyers, walks through four approval regimes as worked examples, and explains why the structure you buy through matters as much as the island you buy. It is orientation, not legal advice; the module ends where your local counsel begins.

Buyers new to this market often assume the legal question is binary: either foreigners can own islands in a given country or they cannot. The reality is a spectrum, and almost every jurisdiction with islands worth owning sits somewhere in the middle of it. Understanding where a country falls on that spectrum — before you fall for an island there — is the cheapest piece of diligence you will ever do. It costs an afternoon of reading and it can save you a year of wasted negotiation.

A word on what this module is. We are a brokerage, not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here substitutes for a qualified lawyer admitted in the jurisdiction where the island lies. What we can offer is the pattern: the shapes these regimes take, the questions they exist to answer, and the vocabulary you need to brief counsel well when the time comes. If a term is unfamiliar, the glossary covers most of what follows.

The three postures

Strip away the local detail and states take one of three broad postures toward a foreign national who wants to hold island land.

Open, with registration

Some jurisdictions let foreign buyers acquire on substantially the same terms as citizens, subject only to the ordinary machinery of land registration and, sometimes, a notification or a modest tax surcharge. Parts of the Caribbean, much of Scandinavia, and Canada's Atlantic coast lean this way. The transaction looks familiar: contract, searches, registration, done. The trap in open jurisdictions is complacency. Openness at the level of ownership says nothing about what you may build, moor, dredge or fell once you own — those questions live in the planning and environmental overlays discussed below, and they bind citizens and foreigners alike.

Permissioned, or sanctioned

The largest group of island jurisdictions permits foreign ownership but conditions it on a specific government approval — a sanction, a permit, a licence — granted case by case. The approval is usually discretionary, usually considers the buyer as well as the land, and usually takes months rather than weeks. The purchase contract in these countries is signed subject to approval, and a seasoned seller's lawyer will draft it that way without being asked. The buyer's task is to understand what the approving authority actually weighs — development intent, investment scale, environmental posture, sometimes simply the character of the applicant — and to present an application that answers those concerns before they are raised.

Closed to freehold, open to leasehold

The third posture reserves the land itself for citizens, communities or the state, and offers foreigners a long lease instead — commonly 30 to 99 years, often renewable, sometimes registrable and mortgageable in its own right. Buyers raised on freehold instinctively discount leasehold, and sometimes they are right to; but a well-drafted 99-year registered lease from a stable lessor can be a more secure position than a contested freehold. The distinctions between these forms of holding — and the older civil-law forms such as usufruct that surface in some markets — are treated at length in our guide to freehold, leasehold and usufruct, which is worth reading alongside this module.

Four worked examples

The postures become concrete when you look at real regimes. Four we deal with regularly illustrate the range.

Seychelles sits squarely in the permissioned camp. A non-Seychellois acquiring immovable property needs government sanction under the country's immovable property legislation, and island purchases attract particular attention because many islands carry environmental designations or existing development conditions. The sanction process examines the buyer, the intended use and the funding, and approvals for outer islands often come with development covenants attached. Our Seychelles guide walks through the sequence and the realistic timelines.

The Bahamas is nominally open but permissioned at scale. Under the International Persons Landholding Act, a foreign buyer of a small residential parcel may need only to register, but larger acreage — which almost any private island is — requires a permit from the Investments Board. The distinction between registration and permit matters commercially: one is administrative, the other discretionary, and contracts should be conditioned accordingly. The Bahamas guide sets out where the thresholds fall and how the permit application is usually assembled.

Fiji illustrates the third posture in its most developed form. The great majority of Fijian land is iTaukei land, held communally and incapable of sale to anyone; it is accessed through leases administered by the iTaukei Land Trust Board, which acts as trustee for the landowning units. A foreign buyer in Fiji is therefore usually negotiating a TLTB lease — its term, its rent reviews, its development conditions — rather than a conveyance. Freehold pockets exist but are scarce and priced accordingly. The Fiji guide explains how the Board works and what a well-structured lease looks like.

Greece shows how a single country can hold two postures at once. In most of Greece an EU buyer acquires freely and a non-EU buyer with modest formality; but a swathe of the country — including many border islands — falls within designated border areas where non-EU acquisitions require a specific lifting of the restriction by committee decision. Layered on top are archaeology and forestry regimes with real teeth. The Greece guide covers the border-zone process and the overlays that accompany it.

The approval is rarely the obstacle buyers fear it to be. The obstacle is applying without understanding what the approving authority is actually being asked to protect.

The overlays that bind everyone

Ownership permission answers one question: may this person hold this land. It answers nothing about what may be done with it. Nearly every coastal jurisdiction layers three further regimes over island land, and they apply regardless of nationality.

The first is the coastal regime. Most legal systems treat the foreshore — broadly, the land between high and low water — as public or state property, and many impose a setback zone above the high-water mark within which building is restricted or forbidden. On a small island this can consume a startling fraction of the usable land. The second is the environmental regime: protected-area designations, turtle-nesting and seabird provisions, mangrove and reef protections, and the environmental impact assessments that condition any meaningful development consent. The third is heritage: wrecks, archaeological deposits and historic structures, which in countries like Greece can freeze works on discovery. None of these is a reason to walk away; all of them are reasons to know the designations before you price the island, and they belong in the diligence sequence described in Module 7 and in our due diligence checklist.

Holding structures, and why owners use them

Most private islands are not held in the owner's personal name, and the reasons are ordinary rather than exotic. The first is succession: an island held through a company or trust passes by transfer of shares or operation of the trust, avoiding a foreign probate in a jurisdiction whose courts the heirs have never seen. The second is liability: an island with staff, boats, guests and a jetty is an operating concern, and owners sensibly separate that operating risk from their wider estate. The third is lawful access: in leasehold and permissioned markets, the approval or the lease is sometimes only available, or only practical, through a locally incorporated entity, and the structure is simply the doorway the jurisdiction itself provides.

What a structure should never be is a device to obscure. Approval regimes almost universally look through to beneficial ownership, and a structure presented to conceal the true buyer invites refusal, revocation or worse. Tax treatment follows the structure and differs by jurisdiction and by the owner's own residence; it needs advice from both ends, taken before the structure is formed, because restructuring after completion is expensive and sometimes triggers the very transfer taxes the structure was meant to manage.

Where orientation ends

Everything above is pattern and orientation. The moment you have a specific island in a specific jurisdiction, the pattern must give way to counsel: a lawyer admitted where the land lies, experienced in coastal or island transactions, and independent of the seller. That is not a formality we recite for protection; it is where the real work happens, because the regimes sketched here turn on current regulations, current committee practice and current politics, and all three move.

Brief that lawyer well and you will save weeks and fees. A good brief looks like this.

State who the buyer actually is — nationality, residence, and the beneficial owners of any proposed vehicle — at the outset, not when the approval application forces it.
State the intended use plainly: private family use, rental operation, development. The approval strategy differs for each.
Send everything you hold on the property — title documents, survey plans, the seller's permits, our dossier if one exists — in one organised package.
Ask for the sequence and the timeline in writing: which consents, in which order, with what dependencies.
Ask what conditions the contract must carry to protect the deposit if approval fails.
Ask what the lawyer cannot do, and who covers the gaps — tax, survey, environmental — so the team is complete early.

If you would like introductions to counsel we have seen perform in a given jurisdiction, write to us through the enquiry form and we will make them without commission or obligation; we hold no financial interest in any referral.

Before you move on

I can name the three postures states take toward foreign island buyers, and I know which one applies in each market I am considering.
I understand the difference between permission to own and permission to build, and I know both are needed.
I know whether my target jurisdiction requires a sanction, permit or licence, and roughly how long it takes.
I can explain why a registered long lease is not automatically inferior to freehold.
I know where the foreshore boundary falls in my target market and who owns below it.
I have checked for environmental and heritage designations before pricing, not after.
I can articulate the legitimate reasons for a holding structure — succession, liability, lawful access — and I would not use one to obscure beneficial ownership.
I know that tax advice must come from both the island's jurisdiction and my own, before the structure is formed.
I have identified independent local counsel, and my brief to them will be complete on day one.
I treat everything in this module as orientation, and nothing in it as legal advice.