Ejido land — the trap that takes everything
Communally held land that cannot legally be sold to a foreigner — and the single most common way foreigners lose everything.
Ejido land is communally held agricultural land created by Mexico’s post-revolution land reform. It belongs to a community — an ejido — not to any individual, and it cannot legally be sold to a foreigner unless it has first been formally privatised through a multi-step process called regularización.
Here is why it is the single most common catastrophic loss: ejido land often looks private. There may be a house on it, a fence around it, a seller with paperwork, and a history of the same family “owning” it for generations. None of that makes the sale legal. A purchase of unregularised ejido land is void — not voidable, void — and the buyer has no title, no recourse, and usually no refund.
The determination is made at the agrarian registry (RAN) and the Registro Público, not by looking at the property or trusting the paperwork shown to you. Whether a specific parcel is ejido is exactly what check 04 of our protocol establishes — before any deposit moves.
The red flags worth knowing: a price well below the area’s market, a seller who resists the registry search, “cesión de derechos” (assignment of rights) offered in place of a proper escritura, and any suggestion that the paperwork can be sorted out after payment.