Plenty of people buy an apartment in Georgia without ever standing in it. The legal machinery for it is ordinary and well used: a notarised power of attorney, an apostille, a Georgian translation, and a representative who signs on your behalf at the public registry.
The machinery is not the hard part. The hard part is that a power of attorney hands someone else the ability to spend your money and sign your name, and the usual protections of being physically present all disappear at once. This is how the process actually works, and where the risk genuinely sits.
What a remote purchase looks like
| Step | Who does it | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Verify the title | You, before anything else | Public registry, online |
| Draft the power of attorney | Georgian lawyer or notary | Georgia, sent to you |
| Sign and notarise the POA | You | Local notary or Georgian consulate |
| Apostille the POA | You | Your country's competent authority |
| Translate into Georgian | Certified translator | Either country |
| Sign the purchase contract | Your representative | Georgia |
| Register the transfer | Your representative | NAPR / Public Service Hall |
Registration itself is fast. Georgia registers a transfer in days, sometimes the same day, and there is no purchase tax or stamp duty to compute. The delay in a remote purchase is almost never the Georgian side. It is the apostille queue in your own country.
The power of attorney is the whole game
A Georgian power of attorney can be written narrowly or broadly, and this single choice matters more than anything else in a remote purchase.
Write it narrowly. A POA that says "buy any property on my behalf on any terms" is an invitation. A POA that names the specific property by cadastral code, caps the purchase price, and expires on a fixed date is a normal instrument that does one job. Ask for the second one.
Things worth pinning down in the text:
- The exact cadastral code of the property, not a description of it
- A maximum price, stated as a number
- An expiry date, measured in weeks rather than years
- Whether the representative may also receive money on your behalf, which is usually unnecessary and usually should be excluded
- Whether the POA can be delegated onward to a third party, which should almost always be prohibited
Two documents, not one. Consider separating the authority to sign the purchase contract from the authority to register at NAPR. It is slightly more paperwork and it means no single document, on its own, moves a property.
Signing it from abroad
Georgia is party to the Hague Apostille Convention, so a document notarised in another member country needs one apostille and no consular legalisation. The sequence is:
- Sign in front of a notary in your own country.
- Get the notary's signature apostilled by whichever authority issues them there. In most countries this is a foreign ministry or a designated court.
- Have the apostilled document translated into Georgian by a certified translator, and have that translation notarised in Georgia.
There is a shortcut worth knowing about: a Georgian consulate abroad can notarise the POA directly. A document issued by a Georgian consulate is already Georgian and needs no apostille at all, which removes an entire step and often a fortnight of waiting. If there is a Georgian consulate within reach of you, ask about this first.
Verify the title yourself, before the POA exists
This is the part remote buyers skip, and it is the part that costs them.
Ownership, mortgages, seizures and disputes are all recorded at the National Agency of Public Registry, and the record is public. You do not need to be in Georgia, hold a Georgian ID, or go through your representative to read it. Anyone can check a cadastral code against the registry, and our title check guide walks through what each field means.
Do this before you sign a power of attorney, not after, and do it yourself rather than accepting a screenshot. A screenshot of a registry extract is trivially editable. The registry is the only thing that decides who owns a property in Georgia, and it does not care what the contract says.
The specific things to confirm:
- The seller named in the contract is the owner named in the registry, spelled identically
- There is no mortgage or other encumbrance recorded
- There is no seizure or pending dispute flag
- For an off-plan purchase, the developer owns the land the building is going on, which is a different check and is covered in our off-plan guide
Paying without being there
Money is the other half of the exposure. A few rules that hold up well:
Pay the seller, not your representative. Wire to the account of the registered owner. If you are asked to send funds to an intermediary, an agency account, or a relative of the seller, that is the moment to stop and ask why. Our guide to the scams foreign buyers fall for covers how these requests are usually framed.
Stage the payment against registration. The natural structure is a deposit on signature and the balance on registered transfer. Georgia's registration speed makes this realistic in a way it is not in slower jurisdictions, because the gap between signing and registration is days.
Expect the bank to ask questions. Opening a Georgian account remotely is possible but inconsistent, and banks apply source-of-funds checks to inbound international transfers. Build time in for this rather than discovering it on the day of completion.
Who signs for you
Your representative should not be the seller's agent, the developer's sales staff, or anyone whose payment depends on the deal closing. That is not a comment on anyone's honesty. It is that a POA removes your ability to say no in the moment, and it should not be held by someone whose interests move in the opposite direction to yours when something goes wrong.
An independent Georgian lawyer is the standard answer. The cost is small relative to the purchase, and the person holding your signature should have a professional obligation to you and nobody else.
When you should get on a plane anyway
Remote purchase works well for new-build stock from an established developer, where the unit is one of many similar units, the specification is documented, and the risk is mostly about the developer rather than the individual apartment.
It works considerably less well for resale apartments, where condition, noise, light, the state of the building, and the neighbours are all things no photograph will tell you, and where the price should reflect exactly those things.
If you are buying resale and cannot visit, the minimum substitute is an independent inspection by someone you are paying, doing a video walkthrough in real time rather than sending an edited file afterwards.
The short version
The legal route is genuinely straightforward, and Georgia is one of the easier countries in which to complete a purchase you never attended. Foreign buyers hold property in their own name with the same rights as citizens, registration is fast, and the registry that decides ownership is open to anyone.
The risk is not legal complexity. It is that you are outsourcing judgement to someone else at the exact moment judgement matters most. Narrow the power of attorney, check the registry yourself, pay the registered owner, and pick a representative who is not paid by the other side.
The complete buyer guide covers the purchase process end to end, and the verified listings in Tbilisi and Batumi show what is actually on the market.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Power of attorney requirements, apostille procedures and bank compliance rules change. Confirm the current position with a qualified Georgian lawyer before signing anything or moving funds.