What you can do from abroad, and what needs someone standing there

The question we are asked more than any other by buyers overseas is some version of: do I have to fly out, and if so, when? The honest answer is that more can be done remotely than most people assume, and not everything. Knowing which is which is the difference between planning one trip properly and making three badly timed ones.

• Searching and shortlisting. Everything on the site is browsable from anywhere, in either language, with no account and no charge.
• Registering interest and receiving the full details. Our disclosure process is entirely remote. You register interest, an agent calls you, you accept the fee terms on screen at whatever hour suits you, and the exact location, the exact size and the full photographs are released to your dashboard. Nobody needs to be in a room for any of it.
• Initial questions and guidance. Most of what a buyer needs to know about a property, an area or a price is answered in a conversation, and the conversation does not need you in the country.
• Viewing, in a limited sense. We will record a video walkthrough and take additional photographs on request. That is genuinely useful for narrowing a shortlist from six to two. It is not the same as seeing a property, and we would rather say so plainly than let you believe otherwise.
• Making an offer. Offers go through your dashboard in the listing's own currency, are validated by us before they count, and can be raised or withdrawn at any time before acceptance. You can see whether other offers exist and the highest validated amount, never who made them or how many people are behind them.
• Engaging a lawyer. This can be done entirely remotely, including instructing them under a power of attorney.
• Preparing the power of attorney. The drafting, the decisions about its scope, the choice of representative — all of it is done at a distance. Signing it is dealt with below.
• Preliminary documentation. Getting your identity documents in order and, where the property comes through inheritance, beginning to establish the chain of heirs. This is the slowest part of most diaspora transactions and the easiest to start early, and starting it early is worth more than almost anything else on this list.

None of this is procedurally necessary. All of it is worth something.

Seeing the property. Photographs and video are genuinely useful and genuinely incomplete, and the gap between them and being there is not small. What does not survive a screen: the approach, the surroundings, the noise at eight in the morning, the light at four in the afternoon, the state of the road over the last hundred metres, who the neighbours are and what they are building. People rarely regret a purchase because of what a photograph showed them.

For land this matters more than for a flat. Slope, drainage, where the boundaries run on the ground as against where they run on paper, and whether a vehicle can reach the parcel in February are all hard to assess remotely, and all of them move the price. A hillside that looks gentle in a photograph taken along the contour is a different proposition when you stand at the bottom of it.

Meeting the people involved. Meeting your lawyer, your representative and the agent handling the file is not procedurally necessary and is frequently worth doing anyway. You are about to trust these people with a large sum of money at a distance of several thousand kilometres, and an hour in a room tells you things a year of messages will not.

This is the short list the article exists for.

• Signing the sale contract. An attorney may sign in your place, under a special power of attorney that names the act. There is no remote substitute for one of you being there.
• Appearing before the land registry to register the transfer. An attorney may appear, under a power of attorney that expressly covers attending the registry and signing the registration instruments. This is the authority most often missing from a power drawn too narrowly, and its absence is discovered at the counter.
• Paying the taxes and fees the transfer attracts. An attorney may do this if the power says so. If it does not, the registration stops there until a corrected power arrives from abroad.
• Payment mechanics. Governed by your bank rather than by law. Opening an account normally requires the account holder in person, and many banks will act only on their own mandate rather than on a general power of attorney. Ask your bank what it accepts early. This is the step most likely to require you personally, and the one nobody thinks about until the money has to move.
• Anything that verifies you are you. Issuing or renewing a Palestinian passport or identity document, and any procedure with a biometric or personal-appearance element, cannot be delegated to anyone under any power of attorney.
• Executing the power of attorney itself. You must attend in person — though at a Palestinian mission where you live, rather than in Palestine. This is the one act no representative can ever perform for you, for the obvious reason.

So a purchase can be completed without you setting foot in the country, provided the power of attorney is drawn properly and the banking is arranged in advance. Whether it should be is a separate question, and the section above is our answer to it.

If you can travel once, the highest-value moment is after a shortlist exists and before you commit — when there are two or three real candidates to walk around rather than a catalogue to browse, and when what you learn can still change the decision. A trip taken after the contract is signed is a nice trip.

If you can travel twice, the second is usually around completion. A well-drafted power of attorney removes the need for it, which is worth knowing before you buy the ticket.

Some practical matters for a diaspora buyer travelling for a transaction. Entry to the West Bank is controlled by Israel and decided at the border; there is no Palestinian airport. Holders of foreign passports normally arrive either at Ben Gurion airport or over the Allenby (King Hussein) Bridge from Jordan. Nationals of visa-exempt countries, which includes Chile, the United States and the EU states, need an Israeli electronic travel authorisation before travelling; beyond that, a short visit to the West Bank does not as a rule require anything applied for in advance. Travellers arriving at Ben Gurion are sometimes asked to sign an undertaking not to enter areas under Palestinian Authority control without separate authorisation, and that undertaking is enforced. Anyone holding a Palestinian identity number, or registered on the Palestinian population register, is in a different position and generally travels through the bridge in both directions.

The planning consequence is the one that matters. Entry can be refused without a reason being given, the bridge keeps fixed hours and closes at short notice, and nobody can promise you will be in Ramallah on a particular Tuesday. So do not schedule a signing around a flight. Schedule the flight around a window, and hold a power of attorney so that a refused entry or a closed crossing is an inconvenience rather than a collapsed transaction. All of this is subject to change; check it close to your date rather than relying on this page.

We act as your presence on the ground for the parts that do not need you personally. We view properties and record what we see. We check the things you cannot check from a screen and tell you plainly what we found, including when the answer is unwelcome. We coordinate with your lawyer and your representative so that the same information reaches everyone at the same time. And we tell you when a step needs you rather than us.

What we do not do is act as your attorney or advise you on the law. Those are separate roles, held by separate people, and they should stay separate. An agency that was also your representative and also your legal adviser would have nobody left to check its work.

This article is general information and is not legal advice. Entry rules, bank requirements and the steps a particular transaction needs all change. Speak to a qualified lawyer about your own situation.