Bali property for sale: reading the listing before you view it

We have no listings. What we have is the thing the listings leave out — which right is really on offer, and how many years of it you are actually buying.

We do not have listings. This page exists because the searches that bring people to listings are mostly not looking for another gallery — they are looking at one and trying to work out what it means.

A Bali listing is describing three things at once, usually without saying which sentence is about which: the right you would hold, the money, and the land and building. Sorting its phrases into those three piles is most of the work.

Twelve listing phrases, sorted into what they are really about

Keep this open next to the listing. The middle column tells you which of the three the phrase is actually describing; the right column is what it means, with the article behind it.

The ownership vocabulary on its own — hak milik, hak pakai, HGB, HGU, girik and the rest — is resolved in a separate table of fourteen terms. This one is about the phrases around them.

Phrases about the right you would hold

These decide whether you can buy at all, and for how long. They are also the phrases a listing is least precise about.

“Freehold”

The word is doing more work than any other in this market. Freehold is hak milik, and article 21(1) of the Basic Agrarian Law reserves it to Indonesian citizens. A listing offering freehold to a foreign buyer is describing one of three things:

• A sale to an Indonesian buyer. Entirely ordinary, and not available to you.
• A conversion. The seller holds hak milik, and on a sale to a foreign buyer the right converts to hak pakai under Permen ATR/BPN 18/2021 article 187(3). This is lawful and normal, and the certificate you end up holding is not the one you were shown.
• A nominee arrangement. The freehold stays in an Indonesian name and you hold a bundle of side agreements. Article 26(2) voids the transfer and the money does not come back.

The three are not distinguishable from a listing. Ask which one it is, in those words, and the answer will be informative either way.

“Leasehold — 25 years”

Two questions the listing has not answered. Twenty-five years from when? A lease granted in 2011 for 25 years has eleven left, and it is entirely normal for a listing to quote the original term rather than the remainder. And twenty-five years of what? An assignment of the head lease, or a sub-lease from the current tenant, which are different assets with different failure modes.

Ask for the commencement date, the term and the document that evidences both. Then run it through the calculator before you compare the price to anything.

“25 + 25” or “with option to extend”

This is priced into the listing as though it were fifty years. Whether it is worth anything depends on whether the landowner is obliged to extend, at what price, and whether that obligation binds whoever owns the land in twenty-five years’ time.

The common form is an agreement to discuss an extension at the rate then prevailing, which is an agreement to agree. The three grades of extension clause is the thing to read before you accept the second twenty-five as real.

Phrases about the money

Every number in a listing is a claim by the seller. None of them is a figure the regulations set, and the one monetary rule that genuinely applies to the transaction is almost never mentioned.

“ROI 12%”

Advertised returns in this market are usually gross rent divided by price, with no deduction for management, maintenance, vacancy, platform commission or tax — and with no reference at all to what the asset is worth at the end.

That last omission is the significant one. A 12% gross return on a lease with fourteen years left is a different proposition from 12% on a right with eighty, because in the first case you are being paid partly out of your own capital. The calculator handles it: it asks how many years remain and reports what is left when you sell. What the law fixes in an investment case, and what the brochure leaves out.

If you already own here and the question is about the management side of that return rather than the purchase, that is a different subject and a different site: balivillacare.com covers management arrangements. We publish nothing about them here.

“Rental guarantee” and “guaranteed return”

A guarantee is a contractual promise by whoever gives it, and it is worth exactly what stands behind the promisor. No regulation we have read sets or backs a rental guarantee. Ask who gives it, in which document, for how long, and what happens to it when that party stops trading.

There is a prior question underneath it. Letting accommodation as a business is a licensed tourism business activity (PP 5/2021 art. 140(f)), and a foreigner’s own home is granted with residential designation as a limit (PP 18/2021 art. 72(d)). A guarantee of rental income from a property you are buying as a home raises the question of whether the right you are buying fits the plan at all.

“Price in USD”

Many Bali listings quote a dollar figure. The Currency Law is specific about payment: Law 7/2011 art. 21(1) requires that rupiah must be used in every transaction with a payment purpose, in the settlement of other monetary obligations, and in other financial transactions carried out in Indonesia. Article 21(2) then lists five exceptions — state-budget transactions, grants from or to abroad, international trade, foreign-currency bank deposits and international financing. A domestic property purchase is not among them.

Read that carefully rather than broadly. The article governs the currency used in the transaction; it says nothing about how a price may be advertised, and we are not claiming a USD listing is itself unlawful. What it does mean is that the question to settle is which currency the contract is denominated in, how the payment will actually be made, and who carries the exchange-rate movement between the day the price is agreed and the day it is paid.

“Price negotiable”

Before negotiating the number, normalize it. Divide the price by the years you can actually use the property and compare that figure across the listings you are considering — the method takes a minute. A discount on a short lease can still leave it the more expensive property per year of use.

Phrases about the land and the building

These are the phrases where a listing is most likely to be describing something the documents do not support, and where the fix is least available after completion.

“Land for sale, 500 m²” — or “5 are”

Bali land is very often listed in are. An are is a metric unit of 100 square meters, so 5 are is 500 m² and 10 are is 1,000 m².

That conversion matters because of a limit expressed in square meters. Article 186(1)(a) of Permen ATR/BPN 18/2021 caps a foreigner’s landed house at one parcel per person or family and 2,000 m² — which is 20 are. A plot listed at 24 are is not a bigger version of the same purchase; for a home in your own name it is outside the article. Buying land, and the four routes to it.

Land listings also carry a risk that villa listings mostly do not: the designated use. A plot that sits in an agricultural or green-belt designation does not become a villa plot because it is advertised as one, and the absence of an existing building means there is no approval history to inspect.

“Rice-field view” and “green zone”

These are selling points and they are also a warning. Land that looks onto rice fields is often land whose own designation is still agricultural, and that is a planning question the certificate cannot answer — the certificate records the right, not the permitted use. Ask for the designation in writing, separately. It is the leading question in Canggu for exactly this reason.

“With IMB” and “fully permitted”

The IMB is the old building permit. PP 16/2021 replaced it with the PBG, a consent to build, alter, expand, reduce or maintain a building to the technical standards (PP 16/2021 art. 1(17)), and the SLF, a fitness-for-function certificate the regional government issues before a building may be used (PP 16/2021 art. 1(18)).

An IMB issued before that regulation is still valid until it expires (PP 16/2021 art. 346(2)), so a listing that says “with IMB” is not describing something obsolete. It is describing something whose expiry and scope are worth checking. And where a building already standing has no PBG, PP 16/2021 art. 346(3) provides that it must obtain an SLF first before it can get one.

“Ready to move in” and “newly renovated”

Neither says anything about whether the structure matches what was approved. A renovation may have altered a footprint that was consented on different terms, and the liability travels with the land rather than with whoever did the work.

Compare the approval documents against what is actually there. This is item nine on the checklist, it is one of the checks that cannot be fixed after completion, and the certificate proves nothing about it — the building is evidenced separately from the land.

“Not yet certified”

The listing is telling you the land has no registered right on it yet. What it has is evidence of acquisition — girik, Letter C, petok D — which sits below a certificate in the hierarchy the regulation itself sets out (Permen ATR/BPN 18/2021 art. 114(1)(b)(1)). Bringing it up to a registered right is a process with a cost and an outcome that is not guaranteed, and it happens before a right exists for you to acquire, not after.

The four questions to send before you book a viewing

1. Which right is on the certificate — hak milik, HGB, hak pakai, or is this a lease?
2. If it is a lease: the commencement date, the term, and which document evidences them.
3. Who is the registered holder, and does anyone else have to consent to a sale?
4. What is the land designated for under the spatial plan?

All four are ordinary. An agency that answers them in a paragraph has saved you a trip; one that cannot has also told you something.

And two more, once you are serious

Which currency is the contract in, and who carries the exchange-rate risk? The Currency Law decides the payment currency; the contract decides who absorbs the movement.

Who will make the transfer deed? A transfer of a land right is only registrable on a PPAT deed (PP 24/1997 art. 37(1)). What that office is, and how it differs from a notary.

We sell no property and take no commission on any sale. The fee is fixed per enquiry and agreed in advance, which is why this page tells you how to read a listing rather than showing you one.

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