Buying off-plan in Lebanon: how to protect your money

When you buy a flat off-plan (على الخريطة) in Lebanon, it becomes yours in law only after the building gets its occupancy permit and is divided into units at the Land Registry. Until then you hold a contract, sometimes with shares of the plot. No law makes the developer keep your money in an escrow account, so your protection is the checks you run, the contract, a provisional registration on the plot and payments tied to the work.

What do you own before the building is divided?

A flat becomes a separate property only when the building is divided into units at the Land Registry. Each unit then gets its own number and its own page in the register (Decree-Law 88/1983). Until then, the plot is one property of 2,400 shares (أسهم), and co-owners hold shares of the whole, not a particular floor.

Division comes late. Under Building Law 646/2004, the registry can't divide a building until the owner shows its occupancy permit (رخصة إشغال) and proof that it's connected to public electricity and water. A part built against the building rules can't be registered as a unit.

So off-plan you sign a promise to sell (وعد بالبيع) or a sale contract for a flat described by floor, area and plans. If shares of the plot are registered in your name, you co-own it with the developer and the other buyers until division. Deed types are explained in title deeds in Lebanon.

The keys can come before the deed. In the five-year payment plans the head of the brokers' syndicate described in May 2024, the developer hands the flat over after about three years, before it's registered in the buyer's name.

Tip: Write into the contract the date by which the developer will apply for the occupancy permit and the division.

Check the plot, the permit and the developer

1. The plot. Get its title extract (how to get one) and check who owns it: the developer, the company selling to you, or a landowner who still has to transfer. Then look for mortgages. Under the Property Law, a registered mortgage covers buildings later put up on the plot and follows it into anyone's hands. Paying part of the debt doesn't free part of the plot, and if the developer stops paying, the bank can have the plot sold.
2. The building permit. The municipality issues it, or the governor or qaimaqam outside municipal limits, and the plans are registered with the Order of Engineers in Beirut or Tripoli. Ask for a copy, check that your floor is in it, and ask the municipality whether it's still valid. Work left undone when it expires needs a new permit or a declaration.
3. The developer. Ask for the plot numbers of buildings they've finished and pull extracts. If those flats have their own unit numbers in buyers' names, the buyers got their deeds. In 2024 the head of the brokers' syndicate called buying through these projects unsafe: the buyers who go ahead know the developer personally, trust them and accept the risk.

Tip: Pull a fresh extract before each large payment. A new mortgage or seizure would show there.

What the contract should say

Have your lawyer check that it covers:

• The flat: floor, plan and area, how the area is measured (balconies, a share of common parts), and a price adjustment if the built area differs.
• Specifications: finishing level, materials, kitchen and bathrooms.
• Parking and storage: numbered on the plan, to be registered with your flat.
• Delivery: a date, a penalty per month of delay, and your right to cancel and be refunded after a set delay.
• Division: who applies for the occupancy permit and division, by when, and who pays.
• Mortgages: when the developer's bank will release your flat.

Then have your lawyer enter it on the plot as a provisional registration. For a promise to sell (Property Law, Arts 220 to 227), it binds anyone who later buys or mortgages the plot from the day it's entered, and your final registration goes back to that date. It must state the price, the agreed period and your name and address, or it's void. Other provisional registrations, such as one based on an ordinary sale contract, lapse after set periods (Decision 188, Art. 25), so ask your lawyer how yours will stay in force. None of them pushes back a mortgage already on the extract.

How should you pay?

Tie each payment to a stage of the work, as the secretary general of the developers' association (جمعية منشئي وتجار الأبنية) advised buyers in May 2024. For example: a deposit at signing, instalments as the structure, facades and finishing are done, and the last payment at delivery.

Plans can run past the build, like the five-year plans above. Bank home loans have all but disappeared, so developers fund these plans themselves (Libnanews, July 2026). Compare them with a Housing Bank loan in housing loans and payment plans.

Pay by transfer or cheque, against a signed receipt, so each payment is on record.

What Lebanese law doesn't cover

Lebanon has no off-plan law. Nothing obliges a developer to keep buyers' money in an escrow account or to insure buyers against the project failing. In May 2024 the head of the brokers' syndicate called for a law with guarantees, such as escrow accounts that pay the developer only at delivery. As of November 2026, no such law has been passed.

People bought off-plan before the 2019 crisis, then building sites stopped, and in 2024 the syndicate head said their money was lost with no solution found. In July 2026, Libnanews reported that many developers had suspended their building sites.

If the work stops, your contract gives you a claim against the developer. Anything registered on the plot before your provisional registration, such as a bank's mortgage, comes first.

Fees, and when you pay them

The registration fee is paid when a sale is registered at the Land Registry: 3% for Lebanese buyers and 5% for foreigners, on the price or the Ministry of Finance's value, whichever is higher. With the smaller fees it comes to about 4% or 6%. Off-plan, you pay it when shares of the plot are registered in your name, or when your flat is registered after division.

Division has its own registry fees, so the contract should say who pays them. The full list is in what buying a home in Lebanon costs. To compare with finished flats, search homes for sale.