Things like real estate laws, zoning, types of title, and how you can hold title can vary state to state in the United States but in ways that are seldom meaningful to individual investors. The differences when investing overseas can be significant, compared with both U.S. legislation, regulations, and restrictions, and country to country.

The United States uses common law; most countries where you'll be interested in investing overseas use civil law. This has big implications. You can't assume, for example, when making a purchase with your spouse, that, because both names are on the title, you are taking ownership as joint tenants with rights of survivorship. That doesn't exist everywhere.

A guy we knew in Colombia decided to develop a coffee plantation and sell individual parcels within it to investors. A farm manager would manage the plantation. He promised each investor title to his parcel. The investors would get cash flow from harvest sales plus branded coffee as part of their return. The vision was appealing and fun.

The developer had done his due diligence on global coffee markets, farm prices in Colombia, and the equipment, labor, and infrastructure needed for processing harvests, and he even started an import/export company so he could ship his coffee production to North America.

He bought two coffee farms totaling about 40 hectares. One had a processing facility on it. Both had land beyond what had been planted, allowing for expansion.

He marketed quarter-acre parcels (1,000 square meters, or one-tenth of a hectare). The sales price was affordable, and he sold a lot of parcels quickly. The project took off. He toured investors at the farms, showing off his facilities for processing the coffee beans, even staging coffee-tasting classes and awarding certificates for the best noses and palates.

Meanwhile, he engaged surveyors to create the segregation plan for the quarter-acre parcels. When that work was finished, he presented the plan to the local land office for approval. That's when he discovered he had a problem. The minimum allowable size for a piece of rural property in that municipality of Colombia was five hectares. He wasn't going to be able to title the quarter-acre parcels he'd promised and sold to his investors.

Not that he accepted that reality easily or quickly. He spent a lot of time and money on attorneys and speaking with local officials. Finally, though, he had to concede that he wasn't going to be able to give individual titles to his buyers. He and his lawyers came up with a creative alternative plan. They presented each investor with a title to whichever of the two coffee properties he'd bought into with every individual investor's percentage of ownership listed out. Not the same as an individual title but a reasonable resolution.

One might take from that story that five hectares is the standard allowable minimum size for rural property in Colombia. It isn't.

Every five years, each municipality in Colombia (and in other Latin American countries, too) publishes what's referred to as an Esquema de Ordenamiento Territorial (EOT). The EOT is the development plan for the municipality and lays out zoning rules, minimum allowable parcel sizes, and land use requirements. These things vary municipality by municipality and are reconsidered every five years.

Another colleague developed a series of timber plantations in another region of Colombia. As part of his planning, he checked into the local EOT. In this much more rural region of Colombia, with hundreds of thousands of hectares of virgin land, the minimum parcel size for an individual title is 300 hectares. Most parcels in the region are 1,000 hectares or more.

Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, likewise, impose restrictions ranging from the minimum allowable sizes for rural properties to how much productive or rural land can be owned by foreigners. In Brazil, foreigners can't own more than a certain percentage of the total area of each state. This means it's critical to check locally before buying agricultural land, for example, to confirm that the piece you're purchasing doesn't push the total amount of foreign-owned land in that state over the allowable limit.

Argentina has restrictions on the total amount of land that can be owned by foreigners and also requires foreigners buying in an area considered a security zone to apply for permission first. For the Argentines, the security zones are the country's international borders, primarily the border with Chile.

Our apartment in Medellín, when we bought it, was across the street from a cute little Spanish-style house that had been converted to a small shop selling snacks and sandwiches. This was possible because of a lack of zoning restriction against opening a business in an otherwise 100% residential neighborhood. Zoning is not a thing in Latin America.

On a visit a year after we'd bought and renovated the property, we saw that the little house across the street had been torn down. We had come to rely on the shop for snacks and had gotten to know the owner and his family. Why was the house torn down, we asked our neighbors. The response helped to explain why Medellín is such a green city. Medellín, in its EOT, requires a minimum number of square meters of park area per capita.

When a developer erects a high-rise apartment building in this city, if the number of potential residents of the building upsets the balance between park area and people, the developer is obliged to build a park. When a developer faced this situation in our neighborhood, he bought the little house across the street from our place, tore it down, and made a park. Initially, it was more an open field than a bona-fide park area. As developers have built more apartments in our zone, each has been required to invest in expanding and improving the park. In the years we've owned our apartment, the next two houses adjacent to the former sandwich shop have been purchased by developers and torn down, as well. Trees and shrubs have been planted. Benches have been installed. We miss our little sandwich shop but now appreciate the nice green space.

The park rule in Medellín was a pleasant surprise. Other consequences of a lack of zoning we've encountered over the years have been less so. We knew a couple who bought a house in a quiet neighborhood of Cuenca, Ecuador, only to have a discotheque open up next door. The music blasted until the wee hours. Calls to the police did no good. The nightclub wasn't breaking any laws.

In markets where zoning laws exist, they can change after you've bought. A friend owned a small villa near the coast in the Algarve region of Portugal for decades. She and her family used it for family holidays and personal vacations. Eventually, they found they weren't getting to the house as often as they once had. The now grown kids didn't want their parents to sell, so the couple decided to set the place up for short-term rental to generate cash flow when not being used by the family.

They'd bought in the 1970s, when zoning rules in this part of Portugal weren't restrictive and the government was too busy navigating the depression the country was suffering through to worry about the pace of development on its Algarve coast. However, by the 2000s, the government began paying attention, and, in an effort to prevent its beautiful Adriatic coast from devolving into something like Spain's Costa del Sol, changed the zoning rules. When our friend and her husband decided to add a pool in the back yard to make the house more rentable, they found that the new regulations mandated no new construction within 500 meters of the coast. The area for their would-be pool fell within that zone. They were denied a permit. Without a pool, the property was not competitive as a rental, and selling it wouldn't be easy.

You aren't going to be able to imagine every change or improvement you might like to make to a property over the lifetime of your ownership. Nor can you predict how a country or a region is going to change its zoning laws. So, before buying, ask yourself if the property serves the intended purposes and will be able to meet the expected cash flow projections as is, understanding that as is may be all there ever is. A tourist rental at the beach typically needs a swimming pool. If the property you're considering buying doesn't have a pool and you don't plan to invest in adding a pool immediately (assuming you've confirmed you'd be able to do that), then maybe shop for another property that'd make for a more competitive rental.