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Learn before you buy
Written because we were asked the same nine things in a different order every time. Read it before you talk to anyone selling you something, including us.
Nine stages in the order a purchase actually happens. Each one ends where the next begins, and each is honest about where the risk sits rather than where the sale is.
01 · 3 min path
Lifestyle, income, or both – and being honest about it, because the three point at different parts of the island and different unit types.
02 · 3 min path
HGB via a PT PMA, leasehold, or Hak Pakai. The choice sets your term, your costs and what you can do with it.
03 · 2 min path
Bali is not one market and the micro-markets behave nothing like each other. Twenty minutes changes the buyer, the yield and the risk.
04 · 2 min path
On off-plan, the developer is the risk. Not the market, not the design – the people.
05 · 3 min path
Payment schedule, escrow, currency, and the costs nobody mentions until the notary appointment.
06 · 2 min path
Notary, due diligence, contract, and the point at which you can no longer walk away.
07 · 2 min path
Eighteen to thirty months of nothing happening that you can see, unless someone shows you.
08 · 3 min path
Licence, operator, tax, and what your net actually looks like.
09 · 3 min path
Resale in a market with no MLS and no price history.
Residency decides whether a whole ownership route is even open to you. Tax turns up on the way in, while you hold, and again when you take the money home.
Runs throughout · 3 min
A property guide has to talk about visas, because one of the three ownership routes is gated on holding a residence permit. Here is what each permit is, how you get from one to the other, and exactly which doors each one opens.
Runs throughout · 4 min
Most arguments about Indonesian property tax are two people talking about different moments. Separate the acquisition, the holding and the exit and it becomes tractable – including the part everyone asks last, which is how the money gets home.
Runs throughout · 6 min
The documents behind an off-plan development, what each one proves, and which map layer can stop a build on land the developer legitimately owns.
Runs throughout · 14 min
The line-by-line route from a nightly rate to the money in your account, with every percentage sourced and every gap in the data named.
Runs throughout · 10 min
Selling in a market with no comparables. What a buyer is really valuing, how a lease or a company changes hands, and what the state takes on the way out.
Runs throughout · 8 min
Construction cycles and pre-release pricing are observable. Tourism data is measurable. The top of the market is not. Which of those you can act on.
Runs throughout · 6 min
Three words used loosely for three different risks. What you are paying for in each, how the price and the schedule differ, and who each suits.
Four tools that do what a brochure will not: name the structure that fits you, take a quoted yield apart, total what a purchase actually costs, and show what a lease is worth by the time you come to sell.
Free tool
Seven questions about your stay permit, your horizon and what you want the place for. It names one of leasehold, Hak Pakai or a PT PMA, and shows what taking it costs you.
Free tool
Put the brochure's nightly rate and occupancy in. Watch commission, running costs and the final tax on gross rent take it apart, line by line.
Free tool
BPHTB, notary, diligence, company setup, furnishing, then what it costs you every year, which nobody quotes. Every line explained and totalled.
Free tool
A lease is a wasting asset and it does not waste in a straight line. Drag the years and watch where the value actually goes.
A short list of words does most of the damage in this market, because they are used loosely by people with an interest in them being used loosely. Here are the ones that decide what you own, what you may do with it and what you pay.
Average daily rate: room revenue divided by the number of nights sold. It is an achieved figure, not an asking one, and it says no…
Akta Jual Beli, the deed of sale and purchase. It is the instrument that transfers a registered land right from one holder to the …
Bea Perolehan Hak atas Tanah dan Bangunan, the duty on acquiring a right over land and buildings. Five per cent of the acquisition…
The amount you put aside each year against replacing what short-stay use destroys: mattresses, sofas, outdoor furniture, air-condi…
The window after handover in which the builder must put defects right, and the retention held back until they have been. In a priv…
The window between reserving a unit and committing money you cannot recover, during which the paperwork is checked. Two to four we…
Rental income divided by purchase price, before anything is deducted. Bali marketing quotes 12 to 20 per cent routinely. Net of o…
You cannot hold Indonesian freehold as a foreigner. What you can do is set up a PT PMA – a foreign-owned Indonesian company – and …
Indonesian property rules change, and enforcement changes faster. Every entry in the register carries the date we last checked it, so you can see how fresh our reading is before you rely on it.
Buildings in Bali are limited to 15 metres above the ground on which they stand, under Article 100 of the provincial spatial plan. Height is measured from ground level to the intersection of the vertical plane of the structure and the sloping plane of the roof, which gives traditional roof forms room. The exceptions are airport navigation, places of worship, defence, disaster mitigation and rescue, telecommunications, hazard monitoring, navigation towers, power generation and transmission, and hospitals to a maximum of five storeys. Tourist accommodation is not among them.
Perda Provinsi Bali No. 3 of 2026 protects the beach and the coastal setback as sacred space and as the working ground of coastal communities. It guarantees access and processional routes for customary ceremony including melasti, nyegara gunung and village nyepi segara, protects the placing of ceremonial apparatus and a radius around existing sacred sites, and treats the beach as public space that cannot be privately appropriated. It prohibits obstructing or restricting ceremonial access, damaging or moving ceremonial apparatus without the consent of the authorities or the local Desa Adat, defiling the sanctity of a ceremonial site, and disturbing a ritual. Sanctions run to written warning, suspension of the activity, closure of the site, revocation or cancellation of permits, demolition of buildings and restoration of the space. It works inside the setback line already established rather than redrawing it.
There is no Bali-wide statutory ban on new hotel and villa permits as at 1 September 2026. What exists is narrower and aimed at land conversion. Governor's Instruction No. 5 of 2025 directs regents and mayors not to approve conversion of agricultural land, including sustainable food agriculture land and baseline paddy area, to non-agricultural use, and runs until a provincial regulation replaces it. A partial pause on commercial spatial-conformity approvals in South Badung and Ubud was recommended by the provincial spatial planning agency in June 2026 but not enacted.
Perda Provinsi Bali No. 4 of 2026 controls the conversion of productive agricultural land and prohibits nominee landholding, the arrangement in which an Indonesian name is registered as owner of land a foreign national actually controls. The prohibition bites on anyone acting as intermediary, facilitator or provider of the means by which a foreign national comes to control land that way, so it reaches the adviser and the arranger as well as the parties. Administrative sanctions run to written warning, suspension of the activity, closure of the site, revocation or cancellation of permits, demolition of buildings, restoration of the land, withdrawal of incentives and administrative fines, and the Perda leaves criminal liability under higher law intact.
The coastal setback runs inland from the highest tide line and is at least 100 metres wide under Presidential Regulation 51 of 2016. Regional governments set the actual line for their own coast against topography, coastal physical conditions, disaster risk, ecosystems, public access and drainage, and the adopted line can be wider than the national floor. In the spatial plan the strip is a protection zone, not a buildable one.
Kesesuaian Kegiatan Pemanfaatan Ruang is the finding that a named activity at named coordinates matches the spatial plan, obtained through OSS. Where a detailed plan (RDTR) covers the location it is a confirmation issued within one working day; where none exists it is an approval assessed against higher-level plans and issued within twenty working days. It states the location, the permitted use, and the building coverage and floor area coefficients, and it lapses three years after issue.
Written from visits rather than brochures. Each one says what the place is actually like to live in, and what that does to the numbers.
Every area, with our verdictTHE BEST WAVE, THE WORST ACCESS
A hundred and forty steps down a cliff to one of the best waves in Indonesia and a beach that disappears at high tide. There is no road to t…
THE CLIFFTOP
Limestone, two hundred feet of it, and the last stretch of Bali where you can stand at an edge and hear nothing built. Raffles, Mandarin Ori…
THE COAST AHEAD OF ITS ROAD
Black volcanic sand, rice fields, and Tabanan rather than Badung, which changes which office issues the permits. A 44-hectare private cultur…
THE QUIET SIDE OF CANGGU
Pererenan is what Canggu was eight years ago and the difference is the traffic. The beach road still ends in rice fields, the surf is a shor…
UNFASHIONABLE AND STEADY
East coast, calm water, a hospital, and the most reliable resale market on the island. Sanur is where people go when they have done Canggu a…
FLAT FARMLAND, ONE VILLAGE WEST
One village west of Pererenan and a field back from the sea: flat farmland, warungs rather than beach clubs, and a black-sand beach with a v…
CALM, AND MOSTLY DELIVERS IT
An hour inland, no beach, and the most established foreign community on the island. Ubud sells calm and largely provides it, though the cent…
THE BUILT END OF THE BUKIT
The temple, the best-known left in Indonesia with Padang Padang and Impossibles either side of it, and one road carrying all of it. This is …