Restricted-Zone Ownership
Fideicomiso — how foreigners own coastal property in Mexico
The trust is safe. A trust set up wrong is not.
Along Mexico’s coast and near its borders, a foreigner can’t hold residential title directly. The fideicomiso is the legal way to own there: a trust with a Mexican bank that holds the title while you, the beneficiary, keep an owner’s rights — to use it, rent it, sell it, leave it to your heirs. The bank doesn’t own your property and can’t take it; the trust stands apart from the bank.
What goes wrong is almost never the fideicomiso itself — it’s how it was set up. Terms no one negotiated. Powers drawn too narrow for what you’d want to do later. A price registered below what was paid. Documents never properly checked. Or the trust skipped altogether for a “just put it in a friend’s name” shortcut. Small choices at signing — and every one of them surfaces later, at a sale, an audit, or a death.
What we do
- Check the title first. Before the trust, the title — the ownership chain, the liens, and whether the seller can actually convey it — so you don’t inherit a problem that only shows itself once the property is yours.
- Negotiate the terms — don’t rubber-stamp them. The bank’s fees, the trust’s powers, and what it’s allowed to do are fixed on day one. We set them for how you’ll really use the property — broad enough that you’re not paying to amend the trust later for something that could have been provided for at the start.
- Register it cleanly. We confirm the documents the trust needs before constitution, not after, and see the purchase registered at its real value. Cutting corners on either — understating the price, or skipping a document — tends to come back as a bigger tax, or a registration that won’t hold, down the line.
- Keep it in standing. We keep the trust current through its life: the annual obligations, beneficiary changes, and filings a foreign-held property depends on — so it doesn’t quietly lapse.
- Heirs, sale and succession. Substitute beneficiaries, assignment when you sell, and succession — set up in advance, so the property passes by your plan and not by default.
Why us
You’ll often hear there’s no need for a lawyer — that the notary handles everything and you’re protected. A notary does something essential: makes the transaction official and gives it legal certainty. But a notary stands between the parties, not on your side of them — there to formalize the deal, not to negotiate it, question it, or weigh what it costs you.
So whatever gets left loose — terms no one negotiated, powers drawn too narrow, an unresolved lien, a shortcut taken to save a fee — the one who carries it later is the foreign owner, or the family left to untangle it, long after it could have been fixed cheaply. That is the space independent counsel fills: one side of the table, yours — the trust read and built for how you’ll live with it over the years, not for how fast it signs.
Learn more. For how the structure works in depth, read “Understanding the Fideicomiso Structure”.
Set it up before you buy.
The trust is cheapest to get right at the start — and most expensive to fix once it’s signed and the years go by. Start with counsel.
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