Guides

Look the property up by its address or its catastro number on a parcel map, and you will see the owner the property-tax office has on file. To know the legal owner, check the property in the public property registry. If the owner died or is a company, there is one more step.

The catastro number identifies a property on Puerto Rico's property-tax map. It has 14 digits and is written as 000-000-000-00-000. You will find it in recent deeds and on the public parcel map, searching by address.

What your home is worth is told by recent sales of similar homes near it, the comparables. An appraisal by a licensed appraiser is the formal opinion banks ask for. The tax value is much lower and is no use for setting a price.

To sell an inherited home, the heirs first prove who they are, with the will or a declaratoria de herederos. Then they file with the government's tax office and put the house in their names in the public property registry. To sell the whole house, all the heirs must sign.

An estorbo público is an abandoned or neglected property that the town declares as such after notifying its owner. Under Law 97 of 2026, the town can fine the owner, expropriate the property and sell it. In the first year after the declaration the sale favors people with little access to housing, and after that it can be sold to anyone, investors included.

When a lender forecloses, the court orders the property sold at a public auction. One notice gives up to three dates. At the first the minimum bid is the price agreed in the mortgage deed, at the second two thirds of it and at the third half of it. The winner pays that same day and takes on the earlier liens.

Wholesaling means signing a contract to buy a property at a good price and passing that contract to another buyer for a fee, or buying and reselling it the same day. In Puerto Rico it is done with an option or a promise to buy and sell under the Civil Code, and the sale is signed before a notary. Before you advertise a property that isn't yours, look at the real estate license law.

A court auction sells the property of an owner who did not pay, before the court marshal, and you pay that same day. A bank-owned home is one the lender kept after the auction and now sells itself, usually through a broker and often as it is. The auction asks for cash on the day and for taking the title as it is. A bank-owned home is bought with an offer and a regular closing.

The words you will see most when you buy, inherit or bid on a property in Puerto Rico, explained in a few lines. Most of them are Spanish words that stay the same in English.