Can the State Take Your Property? Expropriation and Compulsory Purchase for Foreign Owners

Published on: July 25, 2026

Last verified: 25 July 2026. Expropriation law is technical and procedural deadlines are strict. The South African position in particular was subject to pending litigation at the time of writing.

Quick answer: Every developed legal system can take private land for a public purpose, and in the jurisdictions covered here it must pay compensation based on market value, to foreign and domestic owners alike. The risk is concentrated at plot level rather than country level: a specific parcel on an infrastructure corridor or under a public-use designation carries real exposure and the rest of the market carries almost none. The two things that actually hurt owners are urgent procedures where the state takes possession before the final price is settled, and regulatory changes that destroy value without ever legally taking the property, which usually pay nothing.

Every country in this guide can take privately owned land from its owner without the owner's consent. That is not a warning sign about any particular market. It is a feature of every developed legal system, and it is how motorways, railways, hospitals, power lines and reservoirs get built.

What differs, and what actually matters to a foreign owner, is three things: what the state has to prove before it can take, what standard of compensation it has to pay, and how quickly it can take possession relative to when the money arrives.

Almost nothing is written about this for international buyers, largely because portals have no commercial reason to raise it. It is worth understanding, because the risk is concentrated and knowable: certain plots on certain corridors carry real exposure, and the rest of the market carries almost none. Due diligence tells you which one you are looking at.

The universal structure

Whatever it is called (compulsory purchase in the UK, eminent domain in the US, expropiación forzosa in Spain, expropriation in France, esproprio in Italy, apallotriosi in Greece, kamulaştırma in Türkiye), the process has the same five stages:

A declaration of public purpose or public interest, made by a designated authority, usually with a public inquiry or consultation stage attached.
Identification of the land and notice to the owner, and registration of the intended taking against the title.
Valuation, either by an administrative body, a court-appointed committee, or the parties' own valuers.
Transfer of possession or title, sometimes conditional on payment, sometimes on a deposit.
A dispute mechanism for the amount, and usually a separate one for the legality of the taking itself.

The two stages worth reading closely in any jurisdiction are the third and the fourth, and above all their order. If possession comes before final valuation, the owner is negotiating from a much weaker position, and inflation and delay work against them.

Country by country: the compensation standard

United Kingdom

Compulsory purchase orders are made by acquiring authorities under specific statutory powers and generally require confirmation by the Secretary of State. Compensation is built on the equivalence principle: the owner should be no worse off in financial terms. The main heads are open market value of the land, severance and injurious affection where only part is taken, disturbance costs, and statutory loss payments including home loss payments for residential occupiers.

The significant recent change is to hope value, the element of value attributable to the prospect of future planning permission. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 introduced a power for acquiring authorities to seek directions removing hope value from the compensation assessment where justified in the public interest, targeted at schemes including affordable or social housing, health and education. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, which received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, went further, widening the circumstances in which hope value can be disregarded and streamlining the process, with parts of the compulsory purchase provisions subject to staged implementation.

For a foreign owner of a UK house, this is largely academic: hope value matters to development land, not to an occupied dwelling, which is compensated at market value plus disturbance and home loss. For a foreign owner of UK land held for its development potential, it is the single most important change in a generation.

United States

The Fifth Amendment permits the taking of private property for public use on payment of just compensation, and every state has parallel provisions. Just compensation means fair market value at the date of taking, generally excluding consequential losses such as lost business goodwill unless a state statute provides otherwise.

Two features matter. First, Kelo v. City of New London (2005) confirmed that economic development could constitute a public use under the federal constitution, which prompted a large majority of states to enact their own statutory or constitutional limits on economic-development takings. The applicable rule is therefore state law, not federal. Second, many jurisdictions allow quick take, where the condemning authority deposits its estimate of value with the court and takes possession immediately, with the final amount litigated afterwards.

Regulatory takings are a separate American doctrine: a regulation that goes too far can require compensation even without a formal taking, but the threshold set by the case law is high and most zoning and environmental regulation does not meet it.

Spain

Governed by the Ley de Expropiación Forzosa of 1954 and its regulations. The process requires a declaration of public utility or social interest, a formal listing of the affected assets and rights, and then the determination of the justiprecio, the fair price. If the parties cannot agree, the price is fixed by the provincial expropriation jury (Jurado Provincial de Expropiación), an administrative body whose decision can be challenged before the administrative courts.

Spain also recognises a right of reversion (reversión): if the public purpose is not carried out, or the land is not used for it, the former owner may in defined circumstances demand the property back. Emergency procedures exist that allow occupation of the land ahead of final valuation.

France

An expropriation requires a déclaration d'utilité publique issued after a public inquiry, followed by a determination of exactly which parcels are affected. Title transfers by order of the juge de l'expropriation, and if compensation is not agreed, the same judge fixes it. The constitutional principle, running back to the 1789 Declaration, is that indemnity must be just and prior to the taking. Where the property is not used for the declared purpose within the statutory period, the former owner has a right of retrocession.

For rural buyers there is a parallel mechanism that is not expropriation but functions like it: SAFER, the agricultural land agency, holds pre-emption rights over agricultural land and can substitute itself for the buyer in a sale at the agreed price.

Italy

Consolidated in Presidential Decree 327/2001. A planning constraint preordained to expropriation (vincolo preordinato all'esproprio) is imposed first and has a limited life; the expropriation decree follows. Compensation for building land is based on market value, with reductions historically applied and subsequently revised following constitutional and European Court of Human Rights rulings. A right of retrocessione exists where the works are not carried out.

Greece

Article 17 of the Greek Constitution sets one of the more owner-protective standards in Europe: no one may be deprived of property except for public benefit, duly proven, and only after full compensation determined by a civil court and, as a rule, paid before the taking. Provisional and final compensation are separate stages, and the courts play a central role rather than an administrative body. Greek practice has nonetheless generated significant litigation, including before the European Court of Human Rights, over rules that presumed an owner benefited from the public work and reduced compensation accordingly.

Türkiye

Expropriation Law No. 2942 of 1983 sets out the framework: a public interest decision by a competent authority, valuation, and a negotiation stage before the administration applies to the civil court, which determines the price and orders registration. Where agreement is reached at the negotiation stage the process ends there.

Article 27 provides for urgent expropriation, available in defined extraordinary circumstances including national defence needs and cases where delay to public investment would cause irreparable loss. Under it, the court has the value assessed by an expert committee within a short period, the administration deposits that amount in an account in the owner's name, and possession follows. The deposited figure is not the final price: the final compensation is still determined in the main proceedings, and the transfer of title is a separate step.

Turkish law and case law also address kamulaştırmasız el atma, where the state takes or effectively sterilises property without completing a formal expropriation. This includes de facto occupation and legal taking, where a zoning plan designates private land for a public use without the authority acquiring it. Provisions added in 2016 require such land to be expropriated or the plan amended within a defined period, with a claim available afterwards subject to a compulsory settlement stage. This is the single most relevant expropriation issue for foreign owners of Turkish land, and it is a title and zoning question, discoverable in advance.

South Africa

The most widely misreported expropriation story in the world, and the facts are specific.

The Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 was signed on 23 January 2025 and gazetted the following day. It provides for compensation that is just and equitable, and identifies circumstances in which nil compensation for land expropriated in the public interest may be just and equitable, with non-exhaustive examples.

However, the Act was not in operation as at mid-July 2026: it comes into force on a date to be proclaimed by the President, and no commencement proclamation had been published. Constitutional challenges brought by opposition parties and civil society organisations were pending, with the main hearing set down for August 2026. In the meantime, the Expropriation Act 63 of 1975 continues to govern, and section 25 of the Constitution continues to require just and equitable compensation.

For a foreign owner of a Cape Town apartment or a Garden Route house, the practical exposure today is the same as it has been for decades. Treat it as a monitored policy question, not a present legal one, and check the position again before you transact.

The Gulf

Both Dubai and Abu Dhabi provide for expropriation of property for public benefit, with compensation assessed by a designated committee rather than through the extensive judicial machinery found in Europe. The frameworks are less litigated and the published case law is thinner, which means outcomes depend more on negotiation and less on precedent. Where foreign ownership is limited to designated freehold areas, the relevant risk is often not expropriation at all but the terms of the master development and the developer's own rights over common areas and infrastructure.

The international layer

A foreign owner sometimes has protections a domestic owner does not.

European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol No. 1, Article 1 guarantees the peaceful enjoyment of possessions across the Council of Europe states, including the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Türkiye. It permits deprivation of property in the public interest subject to conditions provided for by law, and the Strasbourg court has consistently held that a taking without compensation reasonably related to value is normally disproportionate. It has generated a substantial body of case law on delayed compensation, uncompensated planning constraints, and de facto takings, and it is available to nationals and non-nationals alike.

Customary international law requires that expropriation of foreign-owned property be for a public purpose, non-discriminatory, in accordance with due process, and accompanied by compensation.

Bilateral investment treaties between the owner's home state and the host state frequently protect against both direct and indirect expropriation and provide access to international arbitration. The important qualification: whether an individual holiday-home buyer counts as a protected investor holding a covered investment depends on the wording of the specific treaty and on the tribunal's approach. Some treaties define investment broadly enough to include real estate; others do not, in practice, assist a private homeowner. Do not assume treaty cover exists, and do not pay for structuring designed to create it without specialist advice.

The risk that is not expropriation, and usually pays nothing

Formal takings are the visible risk. The larger practical risk to a foreign owner is a measure that destroys value without ever transferring the property, and which therefore attracts no compensation.

Examples that have already affected international buyers:

A licence that is not renewed. Barcelona's decision not to renew its roughly 10,101 tourist apartment licences when they expire in November 2028 will remove a substantial income stream from thousands of owners. It is not an expropriation and no compensation arises.
Rent regulation. Caps introduced or extended across stressed housing markets reduce achievable income on properties bought when higher rents were lawful.
Energy performance rules. France's timetable removing the worst-rated homes from the rental market is a use restriction of real economic weight, delivered through a national law rather than a taking.
Planning downgrades and protective designation. Reclassifying land as agricultural, forest, coastal protection zone or archaeological area can eliminate development value. In several jurisdictions this is compensable only in narrow circumstances, and in some only if the constraint persists beyond a statutory period.
Coastal and shoreline law. Spain's coastal legislation and Greece's public shoreline zone have both produced cases where structures long treated as private were held to sit on public domain.
Demolition of unauthorised structures. Where a building or extension was never lawfully permitted, its removal is enforcement, not expropriation, and the owner generally bears the loss. This is the most common way foreign buyers actually lose money to the state, and it is entirely preventable at the due diligence stage.

What to check before you buy

Every item here is discoverable before contract, in every market covered above:

The current zoning and land-use plan for the plot, and any plan under revision. Ask specifically whether the land carries any designation preordained to public acquisition.
Registered burdens on the title: easements, servitudes, rights of way, utility wayleaves, pre-emption rights held by a public body.
Planned infrastructure corridors within a few kilometres: motorway, high-speed rail, metro extension, transmission line, pipeline, dam, airport expansion. Municipal and regional planning departments publish these, and local council minutes often reveal them earlier.
Any published notice of public inquiry or declaration of public utility affecting the area.
Protective overlays: coastal setback, flood zone, forest map classification, archaeological zone, listed-building status.
The building permit history of every structure on the plot, and whether anything has been legalised, is pending legalisation, or is unauthorised.

A local lawyer will run most of these as a matter of course in Spain, France, Italy and Greece. In markets where standard conveyancing is thinner, you have to ask for them by name.

If it happens to you

Do not ignore the notice. Expropriation timetables are short and many objection and claim deadlines are strict, with no discretion to extend.
Instruct a specialist valuer early, before the authority's own figure anchors the negotiation.
Claim every head of compensation available, not just land value: disturbance, relocation, professional fees, business losses, severance and injurious affection to a retained part.
Coordinate with neighbours. Where a corridor affects a row of owners, joint expert evidence is cheaper per owner and usually stronger.
Take tax advice on the proceeds. Compensation is not automatically tax free, and several countries offer rollover or deferral relief where the money is reinvested within a period, which is lost if you miss the window.
Separate the two fights. Challenging the legality of the taking and challenging the amount are usually different proceedings with different prospects. In most cases the amount is the fight worth having.

Frequently asked questions

Can a foreign owner be expropriated more easily than a local one?
No. In every jurisdiction covered here, expropriation powers apply to property irrespective of the owner's nationality, and non-discrimination is a legal requirement. Foreign owners are, however, more exposed practically: they are less likely to see local notices, less likely to attend an inquiry, and more likely to miss a deadline.

Do I get market value?
As a general rule, yes, in the jurisdictions covered here. The disputes are about what market value means: valuation date, whether development potential counts, and whether the scheme itself is disregarded in the valuation.

What is the biggest real-world risk?
Not a motorway. It is buying a property with an unauthorised structure, a boundary encroaching on public domain, or land whose zoning has been designated for a public use that the authority has not yet acquired. All three are visible in a proper title and planning search.

Does an investment treaty protect my holiday home?
Possibly not. Treaty protection depends on the specific instrument and on whether a passive residential purchase qualifies as a covered investment. Do not build a purchase decision on it.

Should expropriation risk change where I buy?
Rarely at country level, frequently at plot level. The question is not whether a country expropriates but whether this specific parcel sits on a corridor, under a designation, or inside a protected zone.

Keep reading on JanusHermes

Expropriation is a plot-level question, which makes it a due diligence question rather than a country-selection one. JanusHermes aggregates local agency listings across more than 50 countries in 11 languages, with the local agency's contact details on the listing so you can put these questions to someone who knows the municipality.

On the checks that surface this risk, read land registries and cadastres for foreign buyers, is my overseas property legal and how to hire a real estate lawyer abroad. For the country context, see foreign ownership restrictions by country, the Barcelona and Catalonia guide and the rural France guide.

This article is general information about legal frameworks and is not legal advice on any specific property, jurisdiction or dispute. Expropriation law is technical, procedural deadlines are strict, and the position in South Africa in particular was subject to pending litigation at the time of writing. If you have received a notice affecting your property, instruct a qualified lawyer in that jurisdiction immediately.

Primary sources: Land Compensation Act 1961 and the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023; Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (Royal Assent 18 December 2025) and UK government guidance on the power to remove hope value; Spanish Ley de Expropiación Forzosa 1954; Italian Presidential Decree 327/2001; Article 17 of the Constitution of Greece; Turkish Expropriation Law No. 2942, including Article 27; South African Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 and reporting on its commencement status and pending constitutional challenges as at July 2026; European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol No. 1, Article 1.