> it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines
Strange - here in Lapu-Lapu, a too-nasty salesperson has convinced me (a foreigner) to enter a contract to buy a not-yet-built condo unit. I just pay a certain amount every month using my bank account, they get the money, and on an agreed-upon date, the unit will be mine. I can go at any time and watch how the construction work proceeds. So far, their proposed date looks like a reasonable expectation of when the unit will be ready.
In other words, it's the same process as in my former home country.
Extremely fine point of distinction that's important here: a condo is treated as real-estate, but it isn't. (Condo ownership is really more of a transferrable, indefinite exclusive use-right.) Real-estate is fundamentally about buying and selling plots of land, and is only coincidentally about what's sitting on those plots. Buying a condo doesn't put you in top-level possession of a plot of land; even if the building is a residential co-op, what you'd get would be equity in a corporation that holds the plot of land. For non co-op buildings, you don't even get that.
For legal and tax purposes, most countries do abstract over the separate low-level concepts of plot-of-land ownership and condo ownership, resulting in a legal ADT called a "lot"; where each "lot" has its own title that can only be transferred through a notarized process; has yearly property taxes levied against it in proportion to its market value; etc. This isn't a natural abstraction, though — just a common legal "interface" used by the government to manage instances of the two separate underlying contractual implementations. Those implementations still each have their own separate laws that apply to them.
Which brings me to the point: foreigners are forbidden from owning plots of land in the Philippines.
That doesn't stop you from owning a condo — because buying a condo doesn't translate to buying any land.
But you can't legally buy a house in the Philippines — since that purchase would come with land. (Or rather, is a purchase of land, where that land happens to at this moment have a house on it.)
Instead, to do something equivalent to buying a house, you'd need
1. a Philippines citizen (a real proxy person) to buy the house for you, and then assign you
3. possession of the "materials that make up all current structures built on the land" (so you can tear the house down, if you like), and
4. the right to build whatever other new structures you like on the land, and use them for whatever purposes you see fit, including subletting.
(I'm actually not sure whether there's any legal instrument the proxy-person can grant you that would allow you to apply to re-zone "your" land. They might have to apply for that in your stead!)
Strange - here in Lapu-Lapu, a too-nasty salesperson has convinced me (a foreigner) to enter a contract to buy a not-yet-built condo unit. I just pay a certain amount every month using my bank account, they get the money, and on an agreed-upon date, the unit will be mine. I can go at any time and watch how the construction work proceeds. So far, their proposed date looks like a reasonable expectation of when the unit will be ready.
In other words, it's the same process as in my former home country.