Vietnam's Foreign Ownership Cap vs Cambodia's 70 Percent

When Vietnam's Housing Law 2023 took effect in August 2024, it carried one figure that decides how much of any apartment building foreigners may hold: 30 percent. The number is exact and not advisory. Once a tower's foreign quota is full, no further foreign buyer can be registered against it, whatever a sales desk says at the deposit stage. A cap is never only a rule about entry. It sets the shape of the exit.

Cambodia answers the same design question differently. Its 2010 framework puts the ceiling at 70 percent of a building's unit surface area, held as freehold from the first floor upward. Two neighboring markets, two different answers to an identical problem: how much of a building a foreign investor may own, and on what terms.

The number that sets the ceiling

Vietnam's cap is 30 percent of the apartments in a building, applied block by block where a development shares a common base. For landed houses inside approved projects, foreign holdings are limited to 250 units within an area of roughly 10,000 residents, or 10 percent of the houses in a single project, depending on how the zone is counted. Cambodia's cap is 70 percent of unit surface area per building, with the ground and underground floors reserved and any property within 30 kilometers of a national border excluded from foreign purchase.

The gap between 30 and 70 is not a scale of how open one market is against another. Each figure reflects a different judgment about how much of the domestic housing base a country routes toward foreign capital, and each shapes a different market downstream.

Leasehold, freehold, and the land underneath

The cap is the visible number. Tenure decides the character of the asset. In Vietnam a foreign buyer takes a 50 year leasehold, renewable once on application, with the land itself staying with the state, and the title document, commonly called the Pink Book, records the dwelling and the land use right rather than the land as property. In Cambodia the strata title over a qualifying unit is freehold, held indefinitely subject to the building's co-ownership rules, with no clock on the tenure and no renewal application to file. A 30 percent leasehold and a 70 percent freehold are not two settings on one dial. They are different instruments.

The cap is really an exit statement

Most buyers read a cap as a limit on what they can buy. The more useful reading is what it does to resale. A foreign owner can sell to another foreigner only while the building still has room under its quota, so in a Vietnam tower already at its 30 percent limit the pool of eligible foreign buyers at resale is, by definition, capped at that same 30 percent. The Housing Law 2023 helped materially by confirming that foreigners may sell to other foreigners, which makes that exit realistic, but the ceiling on who may hold is also the ceiling on who may buy next.

A 70 percent framework widens the same pool, so more of a building can be held by the foreign buyers most likely to value a foreign friendly exit, which deepens the secondary demand a seller can reach without waiting for a domestic buyer to clear. Neither design is better in the abstract, but a buyer pricing a unit should see the cap as the size of the room on the way out, not just the door in.

Reading a cap like an underwriter

• What share of the building a foreign holder can take
• Whether that holder can later sell to a peer
• What happens to tenure at year 50 under a leasehold
• Whether the border zone exclusion is mapped against the specific address

An institution starts with the cap as a covenant, not a brochure line, and asks those questions first. They are answerable in both markets, and the answers differ. The instruction for a cross border buyer is not to rank the two but to match the instrument to the horizon. A leasehold with a renewal clause behaves one way across 15 years and another across 45. Freehold behaves the same at both, which is part of why a dollar priced, freehold, clean title unit tends to suit a buyer who is thinking in decades rather than quarters.

The cap is not a measure of how welcome capital is. It is a measure of how much of a building a buyer can hold, and how much of it they can later sell, and tenure and resale depth decide what the number is actually worth. This is general market education rather than advice. If you want to compare the structure behind a cap for a specific building, a short, no pressure conversation with an advisor is the place to start.