How Foreigners Hold Land in Cambodia: Leases, Companies, Trusts, and Nominees

The Cambodian constitution reserves land ownership for Cambodian nationals and Cambodian-majority entities. A foreigner can own a strata-title unit in a building, but cannot directly own the land beneath a house, a villa, a plot, or a development.

That single rule shapes the entire foreign-buyer market. Anyone who wants exposure to Cambodian land — as opposed to a condo unit — has to use a structure that gives them the economic benefit of the land without legal title to it. There are four structures in common use, and they are not equally safe. Understanding the gap between them is one of the most consequential things a foreign buyer can learn.

Whichever structure you use, get it papered by a lawyer who acts for you, not the seller — see our trusted partners for independent conveyancing firms.

Structure 1: The long-term lease

A registered long-term lease is generally the cleanest way for a foreigner to hold land-based property without owning the land.

Cambodian law allows long leases, commonly up to 50 years, and these can typically be renewed. A lease that is properly registered against the title gives the leaseholder a real, recorded interest in the property rather than a mere private agreement. That registration matters enormously: an unregistered lease is only as good as the counterparty’s goodwill, while a registered lease is recorded against the land itself and survives a change of landowner.

The strengths: it is legal, transparent, and creates a documented interest you can in principle assign or sell. The limitations: you are a tenant, not an owner, the term is finite, and the quality of the deal depends heavily on the lease drafting — renewal rights, transfer rights, and what happens at expiry.

For lifestyle buyers, retirees, and many hospitality projects, a well-drafted, registered long lease is often the most honest match between what the buyer actually needs and what the law allows.

Structure 2: The land-holding company

The second route is to hold land through a Cambodian company. Because a company that owns land must be majority Cambodian-owned, a foreigner can hold up to 49 percent of the shares directly. The remaining 51 percent sits with one or more Cambodian shareholders.

To retain practical control despite holding a minority stake, foreigners use mechanisms layered on top of the shareholding: different classes of shares with weighted voting or economic rights, director appointment rights, loan agreements and security over the company’s assets, and contractual restrictions on the majority shareholder. Well-constructed, this can give a foreign investor effective day-to-day control and most of the economic upside.

But it is a structure, not ownership, and structures can be attacked. The control mechanisms rely on contracts being honoured and, ultimately, on the Cambodian legal system enforcing arrangements that exist to work around the spirit of the land law. The more aggressively a structure tries to neutralise the 51 percent Cambodian stake, the more legally fragile it tends to be. This route suits larger, professionally advised investments where the cost of robust legal drafting is justified — not a single retiree buying one plot.

Structure 3: The regulated trust

The newest route, and the one most under-discussed relative to its usefulness, is the regulated trust. Cambodia’s 2019 Law on Trusts created a formal, supervised framework in which a licensed Cambodian trust company — the trustee — holds the legal title to land, while a foreigner is named as the beneficiary, holding the beneficial interest. The trust deed is a registered, legally recognised instrument, and the trustee is licensed and supervised by the Trust Regulator, now sitting within Cambodia’s non-bank Financial Services Authority.

The reason this matters is best understood by comparison with the nominee route below. Both leave the foreigner holding a beneficial interest rather than legal title. But a trust replaces a private individual of uncertain reliability with a regulated, licensed professional trustee that has formal fiduciary duties, is subject to oversight, and operates under a registered deed inside a supervised regime. That is a categorically stronger position than a folder of private agreements with a friend or a lawyer’s relative.

It is not, however, a clean bypass of the constitutional rule, and it should not be sold as one. The foreigner is still a beneficiary, not a landowner; the framework is relatively new and largely untested in contested litigation; and the real-world security depends heavily on the quality of the trust deed and the reputation and solvency of the trustee you choose. A trust also carries set-up costs and ongoing trustee fees that a nominee arrangement appears (deceptively) to avoid. There is also continuing legal debate about how completely a beneficial interest in land reconciles with the spirit of the land law — which is exactly why specialist advice is essential.

For a foreigner who wants to hold landed property — a house, a villa, a plot — with materially more protection than a nominee offers and is comfortable paying for a regulated structure, the trust is increasingly the route serious advisers point to. We cover it in depth in our dedicated guide to Cambodia’s Trust Law.

Structure 4: The nominee

The last route is the riskiest and, unfortunately, still the most common among under-advised buyers. A nominee arrangement has a Cambodian individual hold the title in their own name “on behalf of” the foreigner, usually backed by a private trust deed, an acknowledgement of debt, or a mortgage in the foreigner’s favour.

On paper it looks tidy. In practice the foreigner’s protection rests entirely on private documents and on the honesty of the nominee. If the nominee sells, mortgages, dies, divorces, or simply denies the arrangement, the foreigner is left litigating a side agreement against a registered owner — an uphill fight. Nominee structures are where foreign buyers most often lose money outright, not to a falling market but to a counterparty who controls the legal title.

The important point since 2019 is that the nominee’s one apparent advantage — a regulated-looking deed without the cost of a real structure — is now better served by a regulated trust. A licensed trustee under a registered trust deed achieves what the nominee arrangement only pretends to, which is why an informed buyer who would once have used a nominee should look hard at a trust instead.

Ranking the four by risk

Structure	What you actually hold	Risk
Registered long lease	A recorded leasehold interest	Lower
Regulated trust	A beneficial interest under a licensed trustee	Lower–moderate; newer, deed- and trustee-dependent
Land-holding company	A minority stake plus control contracts	Moderate, drafting-dependent
Nominee	A private claim against the title-holder	High

Strata ownership in your own name, where it is available, sits above all four — it is the only structure where a foreigner holds registered title outright, which is exactly why so much foreign capital flows into condos rather than land.

The practical takeaway

The structure is not a formality bolted onto a property purchase. In Cambodia it largely determines whether you own anything defensible at all. Two buyers can pay the same money for the same villa and end up in completely different positions — one with a registered lease recorded against the land, the other with a folder of private papers and a nominee’s promise.

Decide the structure before you fall in love with the property, take independent local legal advice that is not arranged by the seller, and be deeply sceptical of any arrangement whose security depends on a single individual choosing to keep their word.