Banned, Taxed, Exempted: The New Map of Who May Buy a Home Abroad

In Toronto, Sydney, Madrid and Auckland, a foreign buyer’s first question is no longer what is for sale but what they are allowed to buy, and until when. The firms that answer it with a sourced, dated page keep the lawful buyers that headlines scare away. A foreign client used to open with stock: which district, at what price. The answer on permission changes by market, by property type and by budget cycle, and a broker who gives it from memory will sooner or later give last year’s rule.

Four markets show the pattern. Canada and Australia run bans with end dates and side doors. Spain has a tax that exists only as a headline. New Zealand has a narrow exemption with a price on it. The firm that publishes each rule with its source, its exceptions and a review date answers the first question before the client asks it, and stops losing lawful buyers to rumor.

Three kinds of no, and one conditional yes

Start with the status column. Whether a rule is law or a proposal matters more to a buyer than the rate or the threshold.

A buyer who reads “Spain, 100% tax” in one article and “Australia, foreign ban” in another cannot tell that the first is stuck in a parliament and the second is enforced law with exceptions that may fit them exactly. A broker can. That difference is most of what a foreign buyer is paying for in the first conversation.

Canada and Australia: bans with end dates and side doors

Canada’s Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act took effect on January 1, 2023. It covers buildings of up to three dwelling units and parts of buildings such as condominium units, and it does not apply outside census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations (CMHC). That carve-out is narrower than it sounds: a census agglomeration needs a population of only 10,000. Since March 27, 2023 the ban has not applied to vacant land, and a non-Canadian may buy residential property for the purposes of development. Work permit holders with 183 days or more left on their permit are exempt, as are students who meet a five-year presence and tax-filing test and buy for C$500,000 or less. Breaking the rule brings a fine of up to C$10,000, and a court can order the property sold (CMHC).

The ban was first set for two years. On February 4, 2024 the government announced an extension to January 1, 2027 (CMHC). In December 2025, Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said the prohibition would stay through 2026 while the government studied what had worked in comparable countries, Australia in particular (Bloomberg). A July 2026 analysis by the law firm Borden Ladner Gervais reported that the government had yet to announce a decision on the Act’s future (BLG). So a Vancouver broker is about three months from a date that could bring an open market, an Australian-style rule or another extension, and cannot honestly tell a client which.

Australia went the other way. From April 1, 2025, foreign persons, a category that includes temporary residents and foreign-owned companies, were generally barred from buying established dwellings (FIRB). The first end date was March 31, 2027 (Treasury). In the Budget of May 12, 2026 the government extended the ban by two years and three months, to June 30, 2029 (KPMG, ATO). Permanent residents and New Zealand citizens remain outside it (KPMG).

Almost every exception is about supply. Treasury’s guidance allows an established purchase when a redevelopment adds at least 20 dwellings, when it supports housing on a commercial scale such as retirement villages, aged care or student accommodation, when a foreign-controlled company employing workers from Pacific island countries and Timor-Leste, including under the PALM scheme, must house them, or when the property is an existing build-to-rent development that stays one (Treasury). New and near-new dwellings are open and usually carry no conditions on use. Vacant residential land usually comes with a condition to finish construction within four years (FIRB).

Read the two bans side by side and the logic matches. Foreign money is welcome where it adds homes and unwelcome where it competes for existing ones. For a developer holding off-the-plan stock, that logic belongs on the project page, in the buyer’s language, with the FIRB citation next to it.

Spain: a headline that never became law

On January 13, 2025, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez presented twelve housing measures, among them raising the tax on homes bought by non-EU citizens who do not live in the EU to as much as 100%. He justified it with a number: non-EU non-residents bought around 27,000 houses and flats in Spain in 2023 (Euronews).

The tax went into a bill from the Socialist parliamentary group, admitted for processing in late May 2025, according to a law lecturer at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya writing in The Conversation. She reads it as aimed at resale homes, since new homes already carry VAT, and argues it risks the Spanish Constitution’s bar on confiscatory taxes and the EU rule on free movement of capital (The Conversation). By March 2026, parliamentary documents showed, it still had not been debated. Reuters reported that the Socialist-led minority government had found it increasingly hard to gain support for legislation, quoted a senior government source saying new taxes are among the most difficult issues on which to gain majority support, and noted that the Catalan party Junts opposes the tax (Reuters).

The market barely moved. Preliminary official data cited by Reuters showed foreigners made up 20% of all buyers in 2025, unchanged from the year before, with Britons the largest group at around 8% (Reuters). What the aggregate cannot show is the buyer who read one article in January 2025, assumed the door was shut, and never called. That buyer appears in no statistic and in no pipeline.

A proposal that has not been debated is not a rule, and a buyer who cannot tell the difference prices in the worst case.

The honest line for a Spanish agency is short: proposed in January 2025, before Congress since May 2025, undebated at the last reputable report. Then a date, and a link to the parliamentary record so the client can check it without you.

New Zealand: one home, five million dollars, five working days

New Zealand barred most overseas buyers from residential property in 2018, when figures cited at the time showed up to 20% of homes in some of Auckland’s most expensive suburbs going to foreign buyers (RNZ). The amendment that reopened a narrow door received Royal Assent on December 19, 2025 (Bell Gully) and took effect on March 6, 2026 (LINZ).

The door has exact dimensions. Holders of Active Investor Plus, Investor 1 or Investor 2 visas, and permanent residents who got there through one of them, can apply for consent to buy or build a home for more than NZ$5 million. The threshold counts land and fixtures, not furniture, and LINZ states that a vendor cannot add artworks, a vehicle or a cashback to push a price over the line. Each visa supports one property, and where both partners hold a qualifying visa, each visa counts. Consent is generally decided within five working days, for a fee of NZ$2,040 on an existing home over the threshold and NZ$3,500 in other cases. Rural land over five hectares is excluded, and so is some waterfront land and some land on islands (LINZ).

Two details belong in every listing agent’s process. Consent cannot be granted before an auction, so an eligible buyer can bid only if the vendor has agreed in advance that the bid is conditional on consent. And LINZ suggests that vendors obtain a sensitive land certificate before marketing a property to investor visa holders (LINZ). For this buyer, that certificate is the most persuasive document in the file.

The pool is small by design. As of December 15, 2025, Immigration New Zealand data showed 491 Active Investor Plus applications covering 1,571 people, and a property economist told RNZ that homes worth NZ$5 million or more make up less than 0.5% of the housing stock, mostly in parts of Auckland and Queenstown, with perhaps a few hundred transactions a year in that bracket (RNZ). A few hundred buyers who each need the same four answers is a market an agency can serve by name.

Publish the permission before the listing

These rules move on the political calendar. Australia’s extension came with a Budget. Canada’s came in a February announcement. New Zealand’s came with a Royal Assent a week before Christmas. A page written once and left alone becomes wrong on a date that could have been predicted, so the review date belongs on the page itself, not in someone’s head.

Separate the two kinds of news. Enacted law goes in the eligibility table. Proposals go in a clearly labeled watch list with their stage and the date of the last check. Mixing them is how a lawful buyer ends up believing Spain has shut its door.

Then steer. The lawful categories are where the stock is: new dwellings and build-to-rent in Australia, development purchases, vacant land and homes outside the census areas in Canada, homes above the threshold with a clean sensitive land certificate in New Zealand. Sorting a foreign buyer’s search by what they may buy, before bedrooms and views, shortens the path to a property they can actually close on.

None of this is legal advice. An eligibility page is a map that gets the buyer to the right local lawyer faster, and it should say so in one line.