Buying — 8 min —
Reading a title before you read the view
The most expensive mistake in Afghan property is not overpaying. It is buying something the seller could not sell.
Land records in Afghanistan run through several overlapping systems — customary deeds, court-registered titles, municipal allocations — and the same parcel can appear in more than one with different boundaries and sometimes different owners.
The practical consequence is that a low price is very often a title problem rather than a bargain. A plot offered well under the street rate is worth investigating precisely because of the discount, not in spite of it.
A survey done in the last two years, a court-registered deed, and a chain of ownership that can be followed back more than one transaction are the three things worth paying a lawyer to confirm before anything else. The view will still be there afterwards.
This is also why land listings on this site carry a survey date. A plot without one is not necessarily a bad plot, but it is an unfinished sentence.
