Buying a Home in the United States as a European Buyer: Title, Escrow, Financing, and What to Check Before Closing
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- October 31, 2026
Buying a Home in the United States as a European Buyer: Title, Escrow, Financing, and What to Check Before Closing
The United States does not ask where you are from before it sells you a house. There is no citizenship requirement, no residency test, no permit to apply for. Foreign buyers purchased 67,100 existing homes worth $45.3 billion in the year to March 2026, according to the National Association of Realtors, and 44 percent of those buyers lived abroad at the time. Florida and California took the largest shares. The market is open, and it stays open.
What catches Europeans is not access. It is the process. If you have bought property in Italy, France, or Germany, you have a mental model: a notary at the center, a preliminary contract, a final deed, a registry. Almost none of that maps onto an American closing. The notary does not exist in that form. The contract you sign first is the contract. Deadlines inside it can cost you your deposit. And the person who protects your interests is whoever you hire for that purpose, because nobody is assigned to it by default.
This article walks through the purchase in the order you will live it: before you make an offer, from offer to contract, the contract period, closing week, and what comes after. It is written for the Italian or European buyer purchasing a home for personal use or as an investment, in the markets this firm works in most, California, Florida, New York, and Hawaii.
Before you make an offer
Decide who is on your side
Four people will touch your transaction. The real estate agent finds the property and negotiates the business terms; in the United States the buyer’s agent is normally paid out of the transaction, and that arrangement should be in writing before you tour anything. The escrow or title company holds the money and the documents and records the deed. The lender, if you use one, underwrites you and the property. And the attorney reviews the contract, the title, and the structure, and represents you if something goes wrong.
Whether the attorney is customary depends on the state, and this is the first thing a European buyer should understand about the four markets.
In New York, attorneys run the closing. Buyer and seller each have one, the contract is negotiated between them, and a buyer without counsel is an anomaly that sellers notice.
In California, escrow companies run the closing and attorneys are not customary in ordinary residential deals. That is exactly why foreign buyers should bring one: the escrow officer is neutral by law and represents neither party.
In Florida, closings are handled by title agents or attorneys, and practice varies by county. Either way, the closing agent is not your advocate.
In Hawaii, escrow companies handle closings, and Hawaii adds a question most Europeans have never encountered: whether the property is held in fee simple or as a leasehold on land owned by someone else. The price difference is large, and so is what you actually own.
Understand what you are getting into financially
Nearly half of foreign buyers, 48 percent in the NAR data against 28 percent of all buyers, pay cash. Paying cash is simpler, but it is not the only option. Many European buyers assume that without a U.S. credit history they cannot obtain a mortgage. That is usually not the case. Foreign national loan programs exist at many lenders. Expect larger down payments than a domestic borrower, commonly a quarter to forty percent, documentation of income and assets from your home country, reserves, and rates above the domestic market. What they do not require is a U.S. credit score. The preparation that matters is starting the conversation with a lender months before you find a house, because the documentation takes time to assemble and translate, and a pre-approval letter changes how sellers read your offer.
Decide how you will hold the property
You can buy in your own name, through a U.S. entity such as a limited liability company, or through a trust. The legal considerations are liability, privacy, and what happens to the property when you die, and they pull in different directions. An entity separates the property from your personal assets and can simplify succession; it also costs money to maintain and, since March 1, 2026, triggers a federal reporting obligation. Under FinCEN’s residential real estate rule, an all-cash transfer of a home to an entity or trust must be reported, typically by the title company, with the names, dates of birth, addresses, and passport or identification numbers of the people who own the entity. There is no minimum price. The rule does not reach a purchase in your own name, and it does not reach purchases financed by a regulated lender.
Each option also carries different tax consequences in the United States and in your home country, and those often decide the question. Di Martino Law Group does not advise on tax matters; the firm structures the legal side of the purchase and works with your tax advisors so that the holding decision is made once, with both in view.
From offer to contract
In most of the United States, the document you sign to make an offer becomes the binding purchase contract the moment the seller accepts it. There is no separate preliminary agreement followed by a deed negotiation months later. New York is the exception that proves the rule: there, the attorneys negotiate the contract after the offer is accepted, and the deal is not binding until both sides sign it, usually with a deposit of around ten percent.
In California, Florida, Hawaii, and most other states, the offer you sign is the purchase contract, and it should be reviewed with the same care as a final contract before it is submitted. The price is the least of it. The offer sets the deposit, often called earnest money, which you forfeit if you walk away without a contractual reason. It sets the closing date. And it sets the contingencies: the conditions that let you cancel and recover your deposit. The three contingencies that matter the most are inspection contingency, the appraisal contingency if you are financing, and the loan contingency. Each has a deadline, measured in days from acceptance. In California the standard form gives a default of around two and a half weeks for inspections; in Florida the period is negotiated and often shorter. When the deadline passes, the contingency is gone whether or not you finished the inspection.
This is where Europeans lose deposits. Not through fraud, but through calendars. A buyer in Milan who assumes the inspection period works like an Italian preliminary contract, flexible and renegotiable, discovers that a missed date in California is simply a waived right.
The contract period
Title
Between contract and closing, the title company searches the public records and issues a commitment showing who owns the property and what encumbers it: mortgages, liens, easements, restrictions, unpaid taxes, and the occasional surprise. You, or your attorney, review it and object to anything that should not survive closing.
Then you buy insurance against what the search missed. An owner’s title insurance policy protects you, for as long as you own the property, against defects that existed at closing and were not found: a forged signature in the chain, an undisclosed heir, a recording error. Lenders require their own policy. Owners sometimes skip theirs to save a one-time premium, and foreign buyers should not. If a problem surfaces in year six, you will be dealing with it from another continent, and the policy is what pays for the lawyers.
Inspection
The inspection contingency is your only structured chance to learn what is wrong with the house. Use all of it: a general inspection, and specialists where the general one flags something, roof, foundation, termites, sewer line. In California you will also receive a set of seller disclosures required by state law. Read them with the same attention as the inspection report; they are the seller’s statements of what they know, and they are evidence later.
Moving the money
Funds from Europe arrive by wire, and three things slow them down. Your bank’s own compliance review of a large international transfer. The escrow company’s requirement that funds come from an account in your name, with documentation of their origin. And time zones, which turn a Friday afternoon wire into a Tuesday arrival. Start the transfer early, confirm wiring instructions by telephone with the escrow officer using a number you looked up yourself, and never act on wiring instructions received by email alone. Wire fraud aimed at closings is common in the United States, and foreign buyers, dealing in a second language across time zones, are a preferred target.
Residential purchases do not raise the state-level foreign ownership restrictions that have made headlines since 2023. Those laws, adopted in more than two dozen states, target agricultural land and nationals of a short list of designated countries. European buyers of homes are outside their scope. Your attorney will confirm it for the state in question, and then you can stop thinking about it.
Closing week
If you are not there
You do not have to be in the United States to close. The established route is a specific power of attorney authorizing someone, often your attorney, to sign the closing documents for you. Two things go wrong with powers of attorney signed in Europe. The first is form: title companies and several states require their own wording, and New York in particular expects a statutory form, so a power of attorney drafted by a European notary on a European template is frequently rejected days before closing. The second is authentication: a document signed abroad needs either notarization at a U.S. consulate or an apostille under the Hague Convention, to which Italy and the other EU states are parties, together with a certified translation if it is not in English.
Remote online notarization, where you appear before a U.S. notary by video, is available in many states and solves a great deal. As an example, in California video notarizations for the conveyance of real property are not acceptable by the county recorder’s offices. the enabling law is in place but depends on a state platform with a deadline of 2030, so a California closing from abroad still runs through a power of attorney or a consulate appointment. Ask early, The answer differs by company and by county recorder.
The closing itself
In an escrow state, closing is less an event than a sequence: documents signed, funds confirmed, deed recorded, keys released. The settlement statement, which itemizes every dollar moving in the transaction, deserves a line-by-line read the day before, not the morning of. Prorations for property taxes and association dues, title and escrow fees, recording charges, and the lender’s costs if any, all appear there, and errors are easier to fix before recording than later.
After the keys
Ownership from abroad has its own list. Homeowner’s insurance is in place from the day of recording, with the policy written for a property that may be vacant for months, which standard policies often exclude. A property manager if you will rent it or simply not be there, with clear authority and reporting. The rules of any homeowners’ association, which can restrict rentals, renovations, and even paint colors, and which bind you from closing. Property tax bills that arrive on the county’s schedule, not yours. And an understanding, before you ever sell, that the United States withholds a portion of the sale price from foreign sellers at closing under a federal rule called FIRPTA, a matter for your tax advisors to plan around well in advance.
One more point, because it comes up in nearly every first conversation. Owning a home in the United States gives you no right to live in it beyond the time your visa or visa waiver allows. Buyers who want to spend more of the year in the property than may need an immigration plan alongside the real estate plan, and the two should be made together.
Residential is not commercial
The process described in this article applies to residential purchases only.. A European buying an office building, a warehouse, or a retail property in California is in a different legal process, with negotiated contracts, limited seller disclosure, environmental review, and commercial leases to read. We covered that process separately in our guide to buying commercial property in California as a foreign investor, and the broader investment context in our guide to U.S. real estate investments for foreign investors.
Where an international real estate lawyer earns the fee
The agent finds the house and the escrow company moves the paper. Neither reads the contract for you, neither tells you that the inspection deadline falls on a day you are flying, neither notices that your power of attorney will be rejected, and neither explains what the FinCEN report will disclose about the owners of your LLC. In a domestic transaction those gaps are survivable. In a transaction run from Europe, in a second language, with the largest wire transfer of your year arriving on a Tuesday, they are where the money goes.
Di Martino Law Group represents European buyers of U.S. residential property from offer through recording. As an international real estate lawyer practice working in English and Italian from Los Angeles, the firm reviews the contract and its deadlines, the title commitment and the policy, the holding structure in coordination with your tax advisors, the powers of attorney and translations that let you close from abroad, and the practical arrangements that keep the property compliant once you own it. For Italian buyers in particular, working with an Italian real estate attorney in the US means the whole process can be explained and managed in your own language, by an international real estate attorney who also understands the documents you are bringing from home.
If you are planning a U.S. home purchase from Europe, the time to involve counsel is before you make an offer, when the contract terms and the holding structure can still be shaped. Real estate investments in the US reward buyers who prepare. Contact Di Martino Law Group for a U.S. residential purchase consultation.
