--- title: "Vietnam Foreign Ownership Cap vs Cambodia's 70%" description: "Vietnam's Housing Law 2023 caps foreign ownership at 30 percent of any apartment building, on a 50-year leasehold. Cambodia allows 70 percent, held freehol" url: https://mfcinvests.com/insights/vietnam-foreign-ownership-cap-cambodia/ --- [All posts](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/) [Cambodia Market Intelligence](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/cambodia-market-intelligence/) [Buyer's Playbook](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/investors-playbook/) [Off-Plan Intelligence](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/off-plan-intelligence/) [Emerging Markets Desk](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/emerging-markets-desk/) [Passive Income Architecture](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/passive-income-architecture/) [Emerging Markets Desk](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/emerging-markets-desk/) # Vietnam Foreign Ownership Cap vs Cambodia's 70% Vietnam's Housing Law 2023 caps foreign ownership at 30 percent of any apartment building, on a 50-year leasehold. Cambodia allows 70 percent, held freehold. Two neighboring markets, two different answers to the same question. The cap is not only a limit on what you can buy. It is the size of the pool you can sell back into. Here is how the two frameworks read side by side. ![](/assets/img/site/writers/samuel-doe-480.jpg) [Samuel Doe](https://mfcinvests.com/insights/writers/samuel-doe/) 31 August 2026 · 5 min read ![Vietnam foreign ownership cap compared with Cambodia, condominium towers in Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh](/media/insights/blog/2026/floor-plan-real-estate-investing-property-investment-5bba95-1600.jpg) In August 2024, Vietnam's Housing Law 2023 took effect carrying a single figure that decides how much of any apartment building foreigners may hold: 30 percent. The number is exact, and it is not advisory. Once a building's foreign quota is full, no further foreign buyer can be registered against that tower, whatever a sales desk says at the deposit stage. For anyone weighing Southeast Asian property, the Vietnam foreign ownership cap rewards a close reading, because a cap is never only a rule about entry. It sets the shape of the exit. Cambodia sits on the other side of the same design question. Its 2010 framework for foreign ownership of units in co-owned buildings puts the ceiling at 70 percent of a building's total 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 co-owned building, with the ground and underground floors reserved and any property within 30 kilometers of a national border excluded from foreign purchase. The distance 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 produces a different market structure downstream. ## Leasehold, freehold, and what the land is doing The cap is the visible number. Tenure is the one that decides the character of the asset. In Vietnam, a foreign buyer acquires a 50-year leasehold, renewable once on application to the provincial authority. The land itself stays with the state. The title document, commonly called the Pink Book, records ownership of the dwelling and the associated land-use right rather than the land as property. A foreign owner holds the apartment, not the ground beneath it. In Cambodia, the strata title over a qualifying unit is freehold. The owner holds the unit indefinitely, subject to the co-ownership rules of the building. There is no clock on the tenure and no renewal application to file. This is the structural difference a headline cap hides. A 30 percent leasehold and a 70 percent freehold are not two settings on the same dial. They are two different instruments. ## The cap is really an exit statement Most buyers read a foreign ownership cap as a limit on what they can acquire. The more useful reading is what the cap does to resale. A foreign owner who later wants to sell to another foreigner can only do so if the building still has room under its quota. 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 improved this materially by confirming that foreigners may sell to other foreigners, which makes a foreign-to-foreign exit realistic where it was once uncertain. Even so, the ceiling on who may hold is also the ceiling on who may buy next. A 70 percent framework widens that same pool. More of the building can be held by the foreign buyers most likely to value a foreign-friendly exit, which deepens the secondary demand a seller can address without waiting for a domestic buyer to clear. Neither design is superior in the abstract. But an investor pricing a unit should understand that the cap is not only the door in. It is also the size of the room on the way out. ## What the Vietnam foreign ownership cap actually prices Set the two frameworks beside each other and the comparison stops being about generosity and starts being about mechanics. A Vietnam apartment offers exposure to one of the region's largest and fastest-urbanizing economies, on a leasehold that now carries a clearer resale path than it did before 2024. The constraint is the quota and the clock: the 30 percent limit can fill before a buyer's paperwork clears at handover, and the 50-year term, while renewable, is still a term. A Cambodia strata title offers freehold tenure and a wider foreign quota, inside a smaller economy whose co-ownership framework is more recent. The constraint there is different in kind: a market where the secondary depth of any given building is still forming. The instruction for a cross-border buyer is not to rank the two. It is to match the instrument to the horizon. A leasehold with a renewal clause behaves one way across 15 years and another way across 45. Freehold behaves the same at both. ## Reading a cap the way an underwriter would An institution screening either market does not start with the cap as a marketing feature. It starts with the cap as a covenant. What share of the building can a foreign fund hold. Can the fund sell to a peer. What happens to tenure at year 50. Is the border-zone exclusion mapped against the specific address. Those questions are answerable in both markets, and the answers differ. The point is that the cap is the first line of the underwriting, not a line in the brochure. A buyer who treats the number that way is already ahead of one who reads it as a headline. The foreign ownership cap is not a measure of how welcome capital is. It is a measure of how much of the building a buyer can hold, and how much of it a buyer can later sell. The investor who compares Vietnam and Cambodia by their caps alone is reading one line of a longer document. Tenure, renewal, and the depth of the resale pool decide what the number is actually worth, and those are the terms that reward study before a deposit rather than after. At My First Corner, comparing the structure behind a cap, not just the figure printed on it, is the analysis we run before a client commits in any market. The conversation is available when it is useful. 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