The gap between agreeing a price and holding registered title is where a purchase is actually won or lost. It is also the part buyers delegate most completely, usually to whoever introduced them to the property.
Never send money to an agent's account
Completion funds belong with a regulated third party — a notary, a lawyer's client account, or a licensed escrow agent — whose obligation is to hold them until the conditions of transfer are met.
Some jurisdictions build this in. France and its territories run purchases through the notaire, a public officer who holds funds and registers the deed. Jamaica's factbook records that funds move via an authorised dealer or attorney escrow. Where the structure is not imposed by law, you have to insist on it, and the insistence is the protection.
Verify the receiving account details by a channel you initiated — a number you looked up, not one in the email. Payment redirection fraud targets property completions specifically, because the sums are large, the parties are remote, and the timing is public.
Register the money coming in, or you may not get it out
This is the step most commonly missed and least commonly reversible, and it happens at purchase or not at all.
Several markets require or reward registering the inbound funds so that sale proceeds can later be repatriated. Barbados records registering incoming funds with the Central Bank to simplify future repatriation. Colombia notes registering the FX inflow with a bank at purchase to ease later repatriation. Morocco records the same requirement. Zanzibar's regime allows rental income to be repatriated in hard currency under the Foreign Exchange Act.
In each case the paperwork is trivial at the time and cannot be reconstructed afterwards. Ask one question before you transfer: what do I need to file now so that I can take the proceeds out later?
Fix the exchange rate deliberately, not by accident
A purchase agreed in one currency and funded from another is an unhedged position from the day you sign. On a completion running several months, ordinary currency movement can exceed the entire negotiated discount. Banks' retail spreads on large transfers are wide enough to matter on their own.
Decide explicitly whether to fix the rate forward or accept the movement. Both are defensible; drifting into it is not.
Make the contract carry the conditions
Everything the purchase depends on belongs in the agreement as a condition, with a consequence attached: the permission or licence being granted, clean title being confirmed, the survey being satisfactory, completion happening by a date. A promise made in correspondence is not a term of the contract.
Our companion piece sets out the clauses worth insisting on, and the checks each one should be conditional upon are in title, permits and due diligence.
Budget the closing costs as part of the price
Transfer taxes, notarial and registration fees, legal costs and licence fees vary from about 1% to well into double digits, and a licence priced as a percentage of value — as in several Caribbean markets — changes the arithmetic of the whole purchase. Each Destination Factbook states the local load; reporting obligations at home are separate again and fall on you regardless.
The transfer is not the end
Registration is. Until the transfer is recorded in the land register in your name or your structure's name, you have a contract rather than a property. Obtain the registered entry, read it, and check the name and the boundaries on it match what you bought.
Then set up what the asset needs from day one: insurance from the date risk passes, utilities transferred, local tax registration, and someone with keys who is not four thousand miles away.
Nothing here is legal advice, and completion procedure differs in every jurisdiction. Use it to know what your lawyer should be doing, and to notice if nobody is.