When Shel Greb—a Los Angeles–based production designer for television commercials—and her husband were looking to buy a second home, they looked first at properties in Cabo Puma, Mexico, about an hour south of Cabo San Lucas. A developer had advertised roomy lots on which the couple hoped to build a villa. It was tempting, except that Greb has friends who had already tried to buy in that area, and they had spent years fighting to get title to the land.

Mexico and much of Central and South America are under a legal system called civil law, which places great emphasis on codification. No land transfer takes place without the presence of a notario publico, a sort of cross between a lawyer and a judge, who charges thousands of dollars to draw up deeds and make sure the buyers and sellers conform to the letter of the written law. Individuals buying land also have to prove that the title to it is clear, which is not always an easy task. In Mexico, the government has given out lots of land as community property called ejidos. (The ejido system originated during the period of Aztec rule.) In order to purchase this land, the buyer must get the agreement of at least two-thirds of the people living on it, a procedure that can take years.

"It has been quite a learning process to figure out how to free these lands from these owners," says Letvia Arza-Goderich, a real estate attorney at Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll. Her firm employs more than one specialist in ejido law. "It can take 10 to 12 years to go through the process of buying the land, or it can be done in as quickly as five years. Still, buyers and developers must be aware of these issues before they set unrealistic projections around when they can build on a property," she says. In some countries, such as Honduras and Costa Rica, the law recognizes squatter’s rights, which means that land that seems unused can be claimed by someone else.

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