Kai, strategic investment adviser for buyers in Bali

What I help with

• Buying a villa in Bali as a foreigner. Leasehold, Hak Pakai with residency, or HGB through a PT PMA, and which one fits what you actually want to do with the property
• Land and title due diligence. The certificate (SHM, SHGB or Hak Pakai), the BPN check, the owner and the heirs, the access road and the boundaries
• Zoning and permits. The RDTR zone colour, KDB and KLB, setbacks, PBG building approval and SLF, and how long each really takes in each regency
• Off-plan villas and developers. Whether the developer controls the land, how payments are tied to construction, and what happens if a project stops
• Rental yields and licensing. Net rather than gross returns, management and platform costs, and whether a villa may legally take paying guests at all
• Where to buy. Canggu, Berawa, Pererenan, Seminyak, Umalas, Uluwatu and the Bukit, Sanur, Ubud, Tabanan, Nusa Penida and Lombok, and the rule that breaks deals in each
• Residency linked to property. The Second Home visa, investor KITAS and the permits that decide which title you can hold
• Exit planning. Selling the remaining years of a lease, extensions, and what the property is worth with ten years left instead of twenty-five

Different islands are not interchangeable. Spatial rules, permit timelines and enforcement vary by regency and province, and an assumption carried from Canggu to Lombok is a common and expensive mistake.

Who I work with

Buyers from Australia, the UK, the US, Singapore and across Europe. Many of them compare Bali with what they know from home: Spain and Portugal, Mauritius and Dubai, Thailand and Mallorca. So the site also has guides written for buyers from specific countries, in their own language:

• Français
• Deutsch
• Nederlands
• Svenska
• Norsk

Why this site exists

Most Bali property information is published by people selling Bali property. That is not a conspiracy, it is an incentive, and it means the honest answers to the hardest questions tend not to get written down.

Foreigners cannot own freehold land in Indonesia. Nominee arrangements, still the most commonly sold structure on the island, have been void since 1960 and criminal in Bali since February 2026. Advertised rental yields are gross figures that ignore platform commission, regional tax, management, staffing and, on a lease, the fact that the asset expires. None of that is secret. It is simply inconvenient to the sale.

This site publishes it anyway. There are 456 answers here, each with the regulation it relies on and the date it was last checked. The videos that started Bali Off Script reached more than 1.7 million views in a single month, most of them from people asking the questions these pages answer.

How to judge whether I am any use

Not by testimonials, which anyone can write. By whether the reasoning holds up when you check it:

• Regulations are named by number in the text where one exists, so you can look it up rather than take my word for it
• Pages are rewritten when the rules change, not left to rot
• Where rules are ambiguous, recently changed, or applied differently between regencies, the page says so instead of picking the convenient reading
• Where a figure is commonly cited but subject to revision, it is presented that way rather than as settled fact
• Nothing here is framed as a workaround for foreign ownership restrictions

The return calculator is the clearest example. It shows what a property actually returns after every cost, including the lease amortisation that turns an advertised 12% into something very different. Someone only trying to sell you a villa would not publish that tool.

How I work

Send me a deal and I will tell you which link in the chain breaks first: the zoning, the licence, the lease term or the numbers. The intake list is here, and the Buyer's Kit is the full checklist I use. A first look costs you nothing.

The most useful thing I can tell someone is often “not this one”. A deal that cannot survive being checked properly is not a deal worth doing, whoever is selling it.

What this is not

It is not legal advice, tax advice or financial advice, and reading it does not create an adviser relationship. I am not a notary, a lawyer or a tax consultant. Indonesian regulations change often and are administered inconsistently between regencies and between individual offices. Before you sign anything or transfer any money, verify it with your own licensed Indonesian notary or PPAT, your own lawyer and your own registered tax consultant, not the seller's. The full disclaimer is here.

I work in Bali property, which is how I know what goes wrong. That also means I am not a neutral party, so check what I tell you against your own notary, lawyer and tax consultant, exactly as you would with anyone else in this market.