Living, renting and buying in Panama: first the finca number, then the rest

Yes, as a Dutch citizen you may buy a house in Panama, in your own name and without a residence permit. There is one limit, and it is in the constitution:

• Foreign persons and companies with foreign capital may not acquire land within ten kilometres of the national borders.
• The state may only dispose of island land (pass it into other hands) for development purposes and under conditions.

The quickest test there is: ownership is what stands in the Registro Público (the public register) under a finca number, the number of the registered property. You consult that register online yourself, with an account.

The pitfall is everything offered as ownership without such a number. What is not registered is not a title.

In your first year you don't buy. You rent, you get to know the region, and only then do you decide; why that order is fixed. In Panama that is no formality but the core of the advice, because the title question weighs more here than the price. Meanwhile you rent under the rent law; that is in renting in Panama.

What does the constitution say?

Rule	What article 291 says
Border strip	no ownership for foreigners of national or private land within ten kilometres of the national border
Island land	only disposable for specific development purposes, if the area is not strategic or reserved and has been declared a special development area
Who it affects	also Panamanian companies with wholly or partly foreign capital
Exemption	the article has none

Those ten kilometres affect parts of Chiriquí and Bocas del Toro near the border with Costa Rica, and Darién near Colombia. There is no structure that works around it, not even a Panamanian company, because the constitution names those explicitly. And anyone with an island in mind reads the second rule twice: island land only passes into private hands under conditions, and a seller who cannot show that has something else for sale than he says.

How do you check a title?

The Registro Público de Panamá keeps the registration of every finca and opens its consultations online. You create an account on its site and search by finca number, with the scanned documents from the database alongside.

That is the first question to every seller, before the viewing and before the conversation about the price: what is the finca number? With that number you see:

• who the owner is;
• which mortgages and attachments rest on it;
• what has been transferred in recent years.

If no number comes, you are not buying ownership, whatever the brochure says. Have the check done by your own lawyer, not the seller's or the developer's. Have him also record the cadastral boundaries and the distance to the national border. The finca number is also what the rent law asks of a landlord and what you later need at every counter.