Vietnam property law for foreigners: ownership rights, quotas and the Pink Book

Vietnam does not recognise private ownership of land. Under the Constitution and the Land Law 2024 (Luật Đất đai), all land is held by the State on behalf of the people, and what buyers actually acquire is a bundle of land-use rights rather than the soil itself. Those rights are recorded on the certificate every buyer wants in hand — the Sổ hồng, or Pink Book, formally the Certificate of Land-Use Rights and Ownership of Property Attached to Land.

For a foreign buyer, the distinction is not academic. You can own the building — an apartment, or a landed house inside an approved commercial development — and you receive a Pink Book in your name. What you cannot own is the underlying land. This is why the framework is best understood as a form of leasehold rather than the freehold that European buyers are used to at home. The Housing Law 2023 (Luật Nhà ở) is the statute that opens residential ownership to foreign individuals and organisations, while Decree 95/2024 sets out the implementing detail.

The term attached to foreign ownership is 50 years, renewable once. Vietnamese citizens, by contrast, hold their residential land-use rights on a stable, effectively indefinite basis. The gap between those two positions — a fixed renewable term for foreigners, long-term security for locals — is the single most important thing to grasp before you commit, and it sits at the heart of our complete guide to buying property in Vietnam as a foreigner.

Ownership is proven by the Pink Book, not by the sale contract. Until the certificate is issued in your name at the district land office, you hold a contractual claim, not registered title. Because the categories of asset a foreigner may hold are narrow, it pays to understand the property types open to foreign buyers before you shortlist anything — the rules differ sharply between apartments, landed homes and bare land.

Foreign nationals may buy residential buildings inside commercial housing projects approved for foreign ownership. In practice that means apartments in eligible condominium developments and, less commonly, landed houses — villas and townhouses — within those same approved projects. You cannot buy agricultural land, you cannot buy a plot on the open market to build on, and you cannot buy anything in a designated military or national-security zone. The project itself must be eligible: approved by the local authority, with foreign quota still available.

Two quotas govern how much of a project can pass into foreign hands. In any single apartment building, foreigners may own at most 30% of the units. Across a given ward (phường, roughly 10,000 residents), foreigners may own at most 250 landed houses. Once either ceiling is reached, no further foreign purchase in that building or ward is possible — buying beyond the cap cannot produce a valid Pink Book, so quota verification is a non-negotiable step, set out in our step-by-step buying process.

The picture changes for Việt Kiều — overseas Vietnamese. Since the Land Law 2024, Vietnamese nationals resident abroad and people of Vietnamese origin hold rights close to those of resident citizens: broadly, they can hold land-use rights on the same long-term basis and are not bound by the 30% and 250 foreign quotas. Someone holding a Vietnamese passport is treated as a citizen for these purposes. The table below summarises where the three positions diverge.

One more boundary applies to everyone: the Law on Real Estate Business governs who may sell and under what conditions, which is why a credible developer, a clean title and an available quota matter as much as the headline price when you weigh a specific unit.

• Housing Law 2023 (Luật Nhà ở, No. 27/2023/QH15), in force 01/08/2024 — official English text, thuvienphapluat.vn
• Land Law 2024 (Luật Đất đai, No. 31/2024/QH15), in force 01/08/2024 — official English text, thuvienphapluat.vn
• Law on Real Estate Business 2023 (Luật Kinh doanh Bất động sản, No. 29/2023/QH15), in force 01/08/2024 — official English text, thuvienphapluat.vn
• Decree 95/2024/ND-CP — implementing decree setting out the detail of foreign ownership under the Housing Law 2023 (cited for reference; no verified official English URL at time of writing).