Panama Extends Discount on Qualified Investor Real Estate Route by Another Two Years
Panama keeps its Qualified Investor Visa minimum investment requirement for real estate at US$300,000 for another two years.
When Panama in October 2020 gazetted its new golden visa program – the Qualified Investor Visa (QIV) PR Program, which offers immediate permanent residency with a five-year path to citizenship – it stipulated minimum investment amounts of US$500,000 for real estate and securities and US$750,000 for bank deposits. For the real estate option, however, the October 2020 decree provided an exemption allowing investors to qualify by investing just US$300,000 – rather than the official US$500,000 minimum – for the first 24 months of the program’s existence.
The temporary discount was set to expire over the weekend, an event that would have seen the minimum investment amount for qualifying under the program’s real estate option revert to the standard. Two days before the expiry, however, the President of the Republic and the Ministry of Public Security published another decree to modify the original from October two years ago, extending the discount’s validity to the first 48 months after the program’s original introduction, i.e. until October 15th, 2024. Panama Qualified Investor applicants, as a consequence, will, for a further two years, be able to qualify for permanent residency by purchasing real estate worth at least US$300,000.
Coincidentally, Migración Panamá's monthly statistical report for September includes, for the first time, discrete figures for the Qualified Investor program: So far in 2022, 93 investors have applied under the QIV, all but one of whom received approvals.
This makes the QIV Panama's second-most popular investment-based visa this year (the country has operated more than a dozen different investor visas in the last decade), behind the immensely popular Friendly Nations visa, a residence by investment program open only to applicants of select nationalities.
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