What Share of Each Country's Housing Is Actually Owned by Foreigners?
Published on: August 17, 2026
Last verified: 17 August 2026. Every figure below is attributed to the institution that published it, with its definition stated.
Quick answer: Every country that has actually measured it reports a single-digit share. Statistics Canada puts non-resident ownership at 4.8% of residential properties in the Vancouver area and 3.4% in Toronto. Australia's ATO register shows foreign buyers at 0.5% of residential acquisitions in 2024-25, against 13.0% of agricultural land. The National Association of Realtors puts foreign buyers at 1.7% of US existing-home sales in its 2026 report. Spain is the high outlier at 13.8% to 19.3% of sales depending on the official source, but roughly six in ten of those buyers live in Spain. Most of the world publishes no figure at all, and the stock of homes foreigners own is almost never measured anywhere.
"Foreigners are buying up our housing" is one of the most politically potent claims in the developed world right now. It has produced purchase bans in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, punitive stamp duties in half a dozen jurisdictions, and the near-total closure of property-linked residency programmes across the European Union.
It is also, almost everywhere, a claim made without a denominator.
This page collects the official measurements we could find of how much housing foreigners actually own or buy, names the source for each figure, and is explicit about what each number does and does not cover. There is no single global table of this, because the underlying data does not exist in most countries. Where we are inferring rather than citing, we say so.
Start here: stock is not flow, and both are called foreign ownership
Nearly every argument about foreign buyers goes wrong at this point, so it is worth being blunt.
Stock is the share of all existing homes in a country that a foreigner owns today. This is what people picture when they hear "foreigners own X% of our housing."
Flow is the share of this year's purchases made by foreigners. This is what almost every published statistic actually measures.
The two can differ enormously and both can be true at once. If foreigners own 3% of the stock but are making 15% of purchases, the stock share is rising fast, and today's price pressure comes from the flow, not the stock. Conversely, a high stock share in a mature second-home region can coexist with almost no current foreign buying.
There is a second trap layered on top. "Foreign" means at least three different things depending on who is counting:
| Definition | Used by | Who gets counted as foreign |
|---|---|---|
| Non-resident (principal home outside the country) | Statistics Canada CHSP, CMHC, Stats NZ | A citizen living abroad is foreign. A foreign national living locally is not. |
| Non-citizen by nationality | Spanish property registrars, TUIK | An immigrant who lives, works and pays tax locally is counted as a foreign buyer. |
| "Foreign person" as a statutory category | Australia's FATA regime | Includes temporary residents and companies with 20% or more foreign ownership. |
This is not pedantry. On the Spanish data, roughly six in ten so-called foreign buyers are foreigners who live in Spain. Presenting that combined figure as evidence of overseas speculation is a straightforward misreading of the source.
Tier 1: countries that actually measure the stock
Only a handful of countries maintain a register or administrative dataset capable of answering the stock question. Their answers are consistently, and surprisingly, low.
Canada
Statistics Canada's Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP) links property assessment rolls with tax residency, making it one of the most complete measurements of residential foreign ownership anywhere.
| Area | Non-resident-owned share of residential properties | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Vancouver CMA | 4.8% | First CHSP release; 5.1% of total residential value |
| Toronto CMA | 3.4% | 3.0% of total residential value |
| British Columbia | 6.2% | "At least one non-resident owner" basis |
| Ontario | 3.3% | "At least one non-resident owner" basis |
| Nova Scotia | 6.2% | Halifax 4.3% |
| Canada, later reference years | roughly 2% to 6% by province | Vancouver 4.2%, Greater Toronto 3% on the 2022 reference-year basis |
Two cautions. First, the provincial figures use a wider definition ("at least one non-resident owner", which captures mixed-ownership couples) than the CMA figures, so the two sets are not directly comparable. Second, CHSP counts a Canadian citizen whose principal residence is abroad as a non-resident owner.
Even at its widest, the answer is single digits. Statistics Canada's own analysts noted that non-resident ownership is concentrated in newer and higher-value properties, which is how a low stock share can still exert real pressure on specific market segments: in some newly built Vancouver-area condo stock, non-resident ownership ran to roughly double the local average.
Australia
Australia's Register of Foreign Ownership of Australian Assets, administered by the ATO under the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act 1975, is among the most comprehensive foreign ownership registers in the world. It publishes a genuine stock figure for farmland and water, and a flow figure for housing.
| Asset class | Foreign-held share | As at |
|---|---|---|
| Agricultural land | 13.0% (stock) | 30 June 2025 |
| Water entitlements | 12.7% (stock) | 30 June 2025 |
| Residential property acquisitions | 0.5% of all Australian residential acquisitions (flow) | 2024-25, down from 0.8% |
That contrast is the single most useful fact on this page. In the country with some of the best foreign-ownership data in the world, foreigners hold thirteen percent of the farmland and half a percent of this year's home purchases. The political attention has been almost entirely on the second number.
Australia's foreign-buyer share fell partly because of policy: application fees for established dwellings tripled in April 2024, and foreign persons are banned from purchasing established dwellings from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2029, with limited exceptions. The mechanics are in our Australia guide for foreign buyers.
Tier 2: countries that measure the flow
United States
The National Association of Realtors surveys its members annually. In its 2026 International Transactions report, published 29 July 2026 and covering April 2025 to March 2026:
- Foreign buyers purchased 67,100 existing homes, down 14% year on year.
- That was 1.7% of roughly 4.07 million existing-home sales, and 2.0% of dollar volume.
- Total value was 45.3 billion dollars, down 19.1%.
- Median foreign purchase price was 465,000 dollars, against 413,600 dollars for all existing-home buyers.
The critical detail, from the prior year's edition: 56% of foreign buyers were living in the United States as recent immigrants or visa holders. Only 44% were buyers resident abroad. The headline foreign-buyer number is therefore roughly double the overseas-money number.
Note also that this is survey data, not registry data. NAR's 2026 report drew on 4,970 responding agents, of whom only 381 had any international buyer at all.
Spain: the country with two official answers
Spain is the best worked example of why the methodology section matters more than the number.
| Measure | 2025 figure | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Colegio de Registradores (property registrars) | 13.8% of sales, about 97,300 transactions | Registered deeds, buyer nationality |
| MIVAU / notarial basis | 19.3% of sales | Signed deeds, buyer nationality, wider coverage |
| Of which: foreigners resident in Spain | 60.9% of foreign purchases | Immigrants living in Spain |
| Of which: non-resident foreigners | 39.1% of foreign purchases | Buyers living abroad |
Both sources are official. They differ because they count at different points in the transaction chain and cover slightly different transaction sets. Registrars have long been the conventional citation; total sales in 2025 exceeded 705,000 units, the highest since 2008, with foreign purchases at a record in absolute terms even as the share eased from 15% in 2023 and 14.6% in 2024.
Applying the resident split to the MIVAU share implies that non-resident foreign buyers accounted for roughly 7.5% of all Spanish home purchases in 2025. That is our arithmetic, not a published figure, and should be labelled as such if you use it.
Regional concentration is where the real story sits: Malaga province reached a record 34.75% foreign share in Q1 2025, and the Valencian Community alone absorbed more than 20,000 foreign purchases in the first half of the year. A 13.8% national figure and a 34.75% provincial one describe the same market.
New Zealand
Stats NZ publishes property transfer statistics by buyer citizenship and visa status. The measure it emphasises, aligning with the Overseas Investment Act definition, is transfers where no buyer held NZ citizenship or a resident visa.
That figure has been remarkably stable at 0.4% of home transfers across recent years, including the year ended March 2024.
Stats NZ also publishes a fuller breakdown that shows how sensitive the answer is to definition. In a representative quarter: 78% of home transfers went to at least one NZ citizen, 12% to at least one resident-visa holder, 9.6% to corporate entities only (whose ownership is not captured in land transfer tax statements), and 0.4% to overseas people. The corporate bucket is roughly 24 times the size of the overseas-person bucket and is unmeasured.
Policy update: the Overseas Investment (National Interest Test and Other Matters) Amendment Act came into force on 6 March 2026, allowing holders of Active Investor Plus, Investor 1 and Investor 2 resident visas to buy or build one residential property valued above NZ$5 million, subject to Overseas Investment Office consent. The general prohibition on overseas persons buying existing homes remains fully in force, and the threshold confines the exception to well under 1% of New Zealand homes. Details in our New Zealand foreign buyer guide.
Turkey
TUIK, the Turkish Statistical Institute, publishes monthly house sales to foreign nationals from land registry data.
| Year | Homes sold to foreigners | Approximate share of all sales |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 23,781 (down 32.1%) | roughly 1.6% |
| 2025 | 21,534 (down 9.4%) | roughly 2% |
| January to May 2026 | 7,068 (down about 15% year on year) | low single digits |
Russian nationals have been the largest single foreign-buyer group, followed by Iranian and Ukrainian buyers. Istanbul and Antalya dominate destinations. Turkey is unusual in that transaction value has been rising while volume falls, indicating a shift toward higher-value purchases.
Tier 3: countries with no official measurement
For most of the world, including the great majority of the European Union, there is no published stock figure and often no reliable flow figure for residential foreign ownership. Where you see one quoted, it is usually one of the following, and each should be treated with care:
- Agency or portal data (the share of a private company's own transactions, not the market)
- Golden visa approvals (a subset of foreign buyers, and since the Portuguese and Spanish closures, a shrinking one)
- Land registry nationality fields where completion is optional
- Municipal second-home or vacancy registers, which capture domestic second-home owners too
If a figure has no named institutional source and no stated definition, it is not evidence.
What the data can and cannot support
It supports the claim that foreign demand is intensely geographically concentrated. Malaga at 34.75%, prime Vancouver new-build condos at roughly double the local average, Antalya and coastal Turkey: the pressure is real in specific submarkets even where national aggregates look trivial.
It supports the claim that foreign demand tilts toward the top of the market. The US median foreign purchase price runs above the median for all buyers, and Canadian non-resident ownership concentrates in newer, higher-value stock.
It does not support the claim that foreigners own a large share of any measured country's housing. Every jurisdiction that has actually counted has produced a single-digit answer.
It does not support treating foreign-buyer statistics as overseas-money statistics. In the United States, most foreign buyers live in the United States. In Spain, most live in Spain.
It cannot address corporate and trust ownership, which is the genuine blind spot. New Zealand's 9.6% corporate-only bucket is the clearest illustration: the ownership behind those entities is simply not collected.
Frequently asked questions
Which country has the highest measured foreign ownership of housing?
Among countries publishing a stock measure, British Columbia and Nova Scotia at 6.2% are the highest sub-national figures we could source from official data. No national-level stock figure above single digits exists in any dataset we found.
Is there a global ranking of foreign ownership of housing?
No, and any table presenting one is combining stock figures, flow figures and estimates from different definitions. That is why this page is organised by measurement type rather than as a single ranking.
Do foreign buyers raise house prices?
The research is genuinely contested and is beyond what a data page can settle. What the data shows is that the effect, where it exists, operates through concentrated submarkets rather than national aggregates. Several countries have imposed bans and taxes; assessing their effects is a separate question and one where the evidence is still developing.
Why did so many countries close their golden visa programmes if foreign ownership is this low?
Political salience and measured share are different things. The closures (Portugal's real estate route in October 2023, Spain's programme repealed by Organic Law 1/2025, Ireland in 2023, the Netherlands in 2024) responded to concentrated visible effects in capital cities and to European Commission pressure on security grounds, not to national ownership shares.
Where can I check my own country?
Start with the national statistical office, then the land registry, then the tax authority. If none of the three publishes a figure, no reliable figure exists for that country.
Keep reading on JanusHermes
Foreign-ownership numbers are the evidence base behind every purchase ban, surcharge and golden visa closure of the last five years. JanusHermes aggregates local agency listings across more than 50 countries in 11 languages, with the local agency's contact details on the listing.
For the rules those numbers produced, see foreign property ownership restrictions by country and why countries ban foreign property buyers. For the market context, read international real estate statistics, the global housing shortage in numbers and how many years of salary a home costs by country. On the ownership structure itself, see homeownership rates by country, second home ownership by country and the world's empty homes. For the debate itself, read foreign buyers and the housing crisis.
This article is general information compiled from the named public sources, not financial, tax or legal advice. Figures are reported as published by each institution and on that institution's own definition; they are not comparable line by line and should not be used as a basis for any investment or policy decision without checking the underlying release.
Primary sources: Statistics Canada, Canadian Housing Statistics Program, non-resident ownership releases; Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation; Australian Taxation Office, Register of Foreign Ownership of Australian Assets, 2024-25 report, and Treasury (foreigninvestment.gov.au); National Association of REALTORS, 2026 and 2025 International Transactions in U.S. Residential Real Estate, the 2026 edition published 29 July 2026; Colegio de Registradores de Espana; Ministerio de Vivienda y Agenda Urbana (MIVAU); CaixaBank Research analysis of resident versus non-resident foreign buyers; Stats NZ, Property Transfer Statistics, and Land Information New Zealand; Overseas Investment (National Interest Test and Other Matters) Amendment Act, in force 6 March 2026; TUIK house sales statistics to foreigners and TCMB balance of payments.
Figures as published; latest available as of August 2026. Definitions differ by source as described above.