Paying for property from abroad: remittances, loans and who receives the money

Money sent from abroad is the easiest part of the transaction to lose. The protection is simple: every payment goes to the developer or the owner, never to a practitioner, and every payment comes back to you as an official receipt. Who receives it. The Contract to Sell or the deed names the account. For a developer, that is the developer's corporate account; for an individual owner, the owner's own account. A practitioner who offers to "receive it for you and forward it" is asking you to take their word for it, and a reservation fee paid into a personal account is the most common way an overseas buyer's first payment disappears. If the practitioner has not been checked at /verify, stop there. How to send it. A bank-to-bank remittance to the named account, with the reservation or contract number in the reference, leaves a trail on both sides. Remittance centres work for instalments but keep the confirmation for each. Whichever you use, ask the developer for the official receipt against each remittance and reconcile them against your statement of account every few months. What it will cost beyond the price. For a sale, the buyer typically carries the transfer tax, registration fees and documentary stamps, while the seller carries capital gains tax — though developers price these differently and pre-selling contracts often add "miscellaneous fees" of several percent. Work it through at /tools/closing-costs before you decide the size of the first remittance. Financing. A Pag-IBIG housing loan is open to overseas Filipino members in good standing, applied for through your representative under the SPA with your proof of income; the Pag-IBIG MP2 savings programme is a common way to build the equity first. Banks with overseas desks lend to OFWs against remittance history and foreign income, again with an SPA for the signing at home. Developer in-house financing needs no bank but costs more in interest. In all three, the lender's legal team will want the SPA to say, in so many words, that your representative may sign the loan and the mortgage. See what a monthly payment implies at /tools/affordability. The Maceda Law. On a Contract to Sell paid by instalment, RA 6552 gives a buyer who has paid at least two years' instalments a grace period of one month per year paid and, if the contract is cancelled, a refund of at least half of the total payments; a buyer with fewer than two years gets a 60-day grace period. Contracts cannot waive it, and a clause that tries to is a reason to ask questions. Start with the overview at /insights/buying-property-from-abroad-the-ofw-guide, and the SPA steps at /buying-from-abroad.