What mistakes do foreigners make buying in Bali?

I have watched the same ten things cost people money for years. None of them are exotic and every one is detectable before any money moves.

One: paying before verification is complete

The mechanism behind almost every loss. A deposit or a payment goes out before the land office check, the zoning check or the permit check is finished, usually because a deadline appeared.

There is always another buyer, always a reason today is the last day. Urgency is the tool used to prevent verification, and a seller who will not allow one to three weeks has answered the question.

Two: using the agent's notary

The notary the agent introduces has a commercial relationship with the agent, who is paid on the sale. Nobody behaves improperly and nobody works solely for you. Questions do not get asked, and findings get characterised as minor.

Your own notary is the only independent check in the transaction. It costs a little more and it is not optional.

Three: reading the term and not the extension clause

Buyers compare thirty years against twenty-five and ignore the clause that decides whether either number means anything.

*Jaminan perpanjangan* is a guaranteed extension. *Prioritas perpanjangan* is a right to ask, at a price set at the moment your alternative is abandoning a building you paid for. Both appear in English translation as "extension rights", and most leases contain the second.

Four: buying an "eighty year lease" that is thirty

Long leases are structured as an initial term plus agreed extensions, commonly 30 plus 25 plus 25, because notaries decline a single term far beyond thirty years. If those extensions are prioritas rather than jaminan, you bought thirty years and paid for eighty.

Five: underwriting to the gross yield

The projection says fourteen percent. That is before management at fifteen to twenty-five percent, maintenance at ten to fifteen, staff, utilities, licensing, platform commission, tax and realistic vacancy.

Net commonly lands at seven to nine percent. That is a good return. It is simply not the number that was used to justify the price.

Six: paying a prime-area price for a short term

At USD 250,000, Berawa offers fifteen to eighteen years. Pererenan offers twenty-five to thirty. Berawa's higher rate and occupancy do not recover a ten year gap in term, and the calculation is not close.

Under about USD 300,000, term beats postcode nearly every time. Buyers do this backwards, from the area's reputation rather than the arithmetic.

Seven: ignoring zoning and permits

Land sold as a villa investment in a green zone where commercial accommodation is not permitted. A finished villa with no PBG, or a PBG for a substantially smaller building. Both are common, both are checkable in a week, and both make the property unsaleable to any buyer doing their own diligence.

Eight: treating it as passive income

A short-let villa is a hospitality business with one unit. With a good manager it needs two to four hours a month plus a proper quarterly review and an annual visit.

Owners who skip the quarterly review do not notice when occupancy drifts from seventy-five to fifty-five percent over two years, because a monthly statement shows what happened rather than what should have.

Nine: not planning the exit at purchase

Your buyer pool is fixed on the day you buy. A USD 250,000 villa on a long term has hundreds of plausible buyers. A USD 900,000 villa has a dozen. A villa with eleven years left has almost none.

Above USD 750,000, twelve to twenty-four months to sell is normal, and on a leasehold the term runs down throughout. If the numbers only work on a fast sale at asking, they do not work.

Ten: the nominee arrangement

Land in an Indonesian person's name with a stack of side agreements presented as giving you control. Indonesian courts treat arrangements designed to circumvent the foreign ownership restriction as void, and Perda Bali 4/2026 prohibits facilitating them.

The loan, the mortgage, the power of attorney and the statement of trust do not save you. When it fails it fails completely, and there is no partial recovery.

The pattern

Nine of these ten cost nothing to avoid. They cost a week or two of patience and a few thousand dollars of independent professional work.

Every foreign buyer I know of who lost money in Bali saved that money first. That is not a coincidence, it is the mechanism.