BestFSBOGuide.com team
Nadia Haddad
Middle East research editor
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. Eligibility here runs by designated zone, so whether a foreign buyer can own depends on the address.
Two apartments a few streets apart can have different answers, so the first thing to establish is the zone a property sits in, before anything about the country as a whole.
The transfer usually happens at a land department and not at a notary’s office. Dubai routes it through the Land Department and its registration trustee offices. Turkey does it at the Tapu Mudurlugu, where the deed is issued the same day if the file is complete. Qatar publishes its freehold and leasehold zones as a list, and that list has been extended more than once. Saudi Arabia has been changing its framework for foreign ownership, so nothing I write about it is safe to leave unchecked for long.
The order of the paperwork matters as much as the paperwork. The developer’s no-objection certificate and the service charge clearance both need to be in hand before the registration appointment, because the desk will ask for both.
A little more about Nadia
I left Beirut in 2013 and it was not by choice. Eleven years of shipping documentation in Doha after that, then Istanbul. A lot of this work is reading the same regulation across three drafts to find the four words that changed. It is dull and I do it anyway.
Areas of focus
- Which zones are open to foreign buyers, checked with the office that administers them
- These frameworks are young. Everything I publish carries the date I last checked it.
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