Buying land in Brazil

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A lot of property in Brazil is sold under contract but without a full land title. This can be done in a non-risky way but it takes very solid contracts and very good legal advice, but you can get very good deals on land as it sells for much less without a full title.

We bought a few hectares of rural land about 30Km out of Canela which we found on bomnegocio.com, but as first-time property buyers we wanted to take the simple safe approach and buy something with a full title. Since the seller was very familiar with buying and selling land, we opted to use a contract that he'd drawn up but then made some modifications based on advice we'd obtained from a friend who's good with property contracts.

The things we added were to have the title validated by the local land registration agency and have declarations from the relevant authorities stating that the land is not used as collateral against any debts and that there's no environmental restrictions on the land.

The general idea of the initial contract was that we'd give 25% of the price after checking together that the land title was indeed valid and then give the remainder after all the declarations have been made which could take a few weeks.

It's very important to go through these procedures regardless of how trustworthy the seller may be, and our case is a very good example of just how important this is. After we went to the land registration office we fist found that the title was in the name of a different family member and that it was a different area than what the seller had thought.

The amount of land available to us that was under full title was actually about 20% less than expected, so the contract had to be adjusted to accommodate these changes, and another of the sellers family members had to be present to sign the contract. This process cost about R$150, but would have cost around R$500 if we hadn't made our own contract together. The picture to the right shows the notary office making our signatures on the contract official :-)

After we were all happy with the contract, we all went to a notary office to get the contract made official and signed by all parties. This all went very smoothly but took quite some time due to the new information coming to light. We then made the transfer of the 25% and flew back to Curitiba and will go down again after all the documentation has arrived so we can make the final payment and transfer the title over which costs about R$1500.

Land area

One edge of our land is bounded by a river which may make the cost of surveying significantly higher. We'll need to ask what the process is here - perhaps we can do it ourselves if the owner is happy to check our measurements and sign off on them.