Buying from abroad
This page covers the mechanics of buying from Harare rather than the legal position of a Zimbabwean buyer — ownership rights, tax and the exchange-control background are set out on the citizen guide, linked below. What follows is the practical sequence: where the money realistically comes from, what can be done without travelling, and what a Harare-based owner manages once the keys exist. We will not advise on working around exchange control, and a RERA-registered brokerage runs KYC on every buyer regardless.
There is no direct Harare-Dubai service, so most buyers connect through Johannesburg, Addis Ababa or Nairobi, putting the trip at roughly 8 hours in the air plus a layover. Dubai is 2 hours ahead of Harare, which is a small enough gap that a working day overlaps almost entirely — useful when a developer needs a same-day answer on a unit release. Travel is not required to complete: title transfer at the Dubai Land Department can be done by an attorney under a power of attorney notarised in Harare and attested for UAE use, and off-plan reservations are handled remotely with a booking form, a KYC pack and transfers. Given the funding constraints below, many Zimbabwean buyers deliberately visit once before committing, because a payment plan is much harder to unwind than a viewing trip is to make.
This is the part that decides whether a Harare purchase happens at all. Remitting capital out of Zimbabwe requires Reserve Bank approval under exchange control, so it is not a routine transfer and should not be planned as one. In practice most purchases are funded from income already held offshore — foreign currency or nostro accounts — rather than converted and sent at the point of sale. Before you commit to anything with fixed dates attached, take the route and the amount to your bank's exchange-control desk and get an answer, because a payment plan assumes you can move money on a schedule and a missed developer instalment is expensive. Expect the UAE side to require documented source of funds before completion: audited company accounts, dividend records, or contracts from a previously sold asset. We will not advise on routes around those controls, and a RERA-registered brokerage has to run KYC on you in any case.
Once the property exists, running it from Harare is straightforward and largely hands-off. A managed let puts tenant sourcing, Ejari tenancy registration, rent collection and the annual service-charge invoice with the agent, who remits net rent to the account you nominate — which for most Zimbabwean owners is an offshore or foreign currency account rather than one in Harare, keeping the income in the currency it was earned in. Rent is increasingly collected monthly rather than in one or two cheques. The costs to model are the service charge, set per square foot by the building, and a municipality housing fee on rented homes; there is no annual property tax and no UAE tax on the rent itself. Model a vacancy allowance: gross yields of roughly 5-8% assume the unit is occupied.
Ownership rights, financing, tax at home and repatriating funds are covered in full on the nationality guide:
Read the guide for ZimbabweanOur RERA-certified agents work with remote buyers every week. We handle the search, video viewings, legal coordination and post-purchase management.