Owning Land Through a Lease
Why not just lease land for 90 years instead of buying it? It's basically the same thing anyway.
That way, in theory, you'd have your own land and could build your own house, and you wouldn't have to live in a shoebox of a condo.
Someone replied that leasing is possible, but it's usually 25 years with a 25-year renewal, and 99-year leases are only for approved foreign investors. A house you build on leased land goes to the landowner when the lease ends, and there's also a bigger risk of the contract falling through, so some people say it's better to buy the land in your wife's name.
It's possible, it's called a lease. If you lease from a Filipino for 25 years and renew for another 25, you can rent the land for up to 50 years, which is probably longer than the rest of your life. Once you lease it, you can build a house on it if you want.
Some people want to leave value to their wife or kids after they die. A lease agreement doesn't allow that.
There are 99-year leases now too. Think of Hong Kong. All those tall buildings are on leased land. A good part of Makati is leased land too. Many of the condos 'sold' in the Philippines are also on leased land.
It's possible. It's common to give foreigners 5-, 10-, or 25-year leases, a kind of quasi-ownership that gets around the land ownership laws. But it's not something you can finish in a few months (if you're thinking of 'owning' the land and building your dream house). The process is cumbersome, and good luck if you try to handle it all by yourself. You could also run into a bad landlord who refuses your lease renewal request 10 years later. In my opinion, it's not a realistic option if you plan to live there a long time, unless you're retired and expect to die soon. There are too many points of failure for me to be comfortable.
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