Ethiopia Opens Homeownership to Foreign Buyers Under New Directive
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A new Ethiopian directive allows non-nationals to register a house in their own name for the first time since the Derg era, with entry prices starting at US$100,000 and a five-year residence permit attached.
Ethiopia has begun implementing Directive No. 1147/2026, issued by the Ministry of Urban and Infrastructure Development in August, which for the first time since the Derg regime allows a non-Ethiopian to register a house in their own name. The directive supplies the machinery for a proclamation that parliament ratified in July 2025.
The price of entry is tiered by geography: US$150,000 in Addis Ababa and Shaggar, US$120,000 across most other regional states, and US$100,000 in Afar, Benishangul-Gumuz and Gambella. The money must arrive from abroad in foreign currency through a licensed bank; borrowing from a domestic lender to close the gap is barred, as is raising the capital inside Ethiopia.
Buyers, together with a spouse and minor children, receive a five-year multiple-entry residence permit subject to criminal-record clearance and national-security screening. Purchases are limited to one house per buyer, and subsidised condominiums built for citizens as well as any commercial use are excluded.
The directive does not sell land. What a foreign buyer acquires is title to a structure sitting on a government lease, the same bundle of rights an Ethiopian has held since the early 1990s, now extended to a class of buyer the 1960 Civil Code had excluded entirely.
Analysts note the Addis Ababa floor converts to roughly 24 million birr at about 161 birr to the dollar, against nominal income per person near US$1,000 a year. The Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa reports that the cheapest formally built 20-square-metre unit, at 600,000 birr, is already beyond reach for most urban households.
Implementation will hinge on municipal record-keeping. Reporting indicates that as of 2023 Addis Ababa's land administration had entered nearly half of the roughly 600,000 plots in its jurisdiction into the cadaster, and legal trackers identify land-eligibility and title verification as the likeliest point of failure. The permit also confers the right to stay rather than to work, with employment requiring separate authorisation.