Can a Foreigner Get a Mortgage on a Caribbean Villa?

Most buyers who assume a Caribbean villa mortgage works like a mortgage back home are wrong on every count that matters: how much a bank will lend, what it costs, and how long they'll wait to find out. A foreign buyer with a spotless credit file and a healthy down payment can still wait months for an answer — and on some islands, no bank will touch the file at all.

The short answer

Yes, foreign buyers can get a mortgage on a Caribbean villa, but budget for less leverage, a higher rate, and a longer wait than a mainland lender would offer. Expect 50-70% loan-to-value — well-qualified buyers in Barbados, the Bahamas, and Cayman lean toward the top of that range, while smaller-island lenders sit closer to the bottom — interest rates that run roughly 5-7% in the region's mature markets and 7-10%-plus almost everywhere else at time of writing, terms of 15-25 years, and underwriting that takes three to six months once you add local landholding-licence approvals on top of standard bank due diligence. CIBC Caribbean and Republic Bank cover most of the region between them, alongside a patchwork of local and regional banks that grew after Scotiabank, RBC, and CIBC all sold off their smaller Eastern Caribbean operations between 2019 and 2023. Private financing barely exists as an alternative, especially on the smaller islands, so a villa you can't finance through a bank is, in practice, a cash purchase.

So who's actually lending, and why did the map change?

For decades, three big Canadian-headquartered banks anchored Eastern Caribbean lending: Scotiabank, RBC, and CIBC FirstCaribbean. That's no longer true on the smaller islands, and why matters more than most buyers realize when comparing rate quotes.

Scotiabank sold its operations in seven Eastern Caribbean markets — Anguilla, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, Sint Maarten, and St. Vincent & the Grenadines — to Trinidad-based Republic Financial Holdings in 2019, adding roughly US$1.5 billion in assets to what's now Republic Bank; its separate Antigua & Barbuda business went to the local Eastern Caribbean Amalgamated Bank in 2021. RBC sold its entire Eastern Caribbean branch network — 11 branches across Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent & the Grenadines — to a consortium of five indigenous banks (1st National Bank of St. Lucia, Antigua Commercial Bank, Bank of Dominica, Bank of Montserrat, and Bank of Nevis), completed in 2021. And CIBC FirstCaribbean, rebranded CIBC Caribbean in January 2024, sold its banking assets in St. Vincent and Grenada starting in 2021; its planned sales of both Dominica (to National Bank of Dominica) and St. Kitts (to St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank) fell through after the ECCB withheld final approval. CIBC closed its Dominica operation in early 2023 but stayed in St. Kitts, rebuilding its retail and corporate business there instead.

The upshot: finance a villa in Barbados, the Bahamas, or Cayman and you're dealing with CIBC Caribbean, RBC, Scotiabank, or a strong local bank — genuine competition. Finance one in Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, or St. Kitts & Nevis, and your lender is Republic Bank or an indigenous bank like Bank of Nevis or National Bank of Dominica — fewer players, less appetite for foreign-borrower risk, and a materially higher cost of money.

One more move on that map is already in motion, and it matters if you're about to sign a twenty-year note. On May 28, 2026, Bermuda's Butterfield Bank announced it would buy CIBC's 91.7% stake in CIBC Caribbean for an aggregate $1.8 billion, with closing expected in the first half of 2027 and a full rebrand of CIBC Caribbean to Butterfield afterwards. That doesn't change your rate or your covenants — a mortgage is a contract that travels with the loan book — but treat "CIBC Caribbean" on any rate sheet you're handed as a name with a shelf life, and read the servicing and assignment clauses before you assume your relationship manager will still be your relationship manager in 2028. I've set out what the CIBC–Butterfield deal means for banking across the region separately, including why I'd treat that closing date as a forecast rather than a certainty.

What terms should you actually expect?

Loan-to-value. Most banks cap foreign buyers at 50-70% LTV — a deposit of 30-50% — with well-qualified buyers in the deepest markets pushed toward the top end and smaller-island lenders sitting closer to 50%.

Interest rates. There's no single Caribbean mortgage rate — treat anyone who quotes you one flat number with suspicion. Barbados and the Bahamas run roughly 5-7% for foreign borrowers; Cayman and the smaller Eastern Caribbean islands run meaningfully higher, into the 7-10%-plus range. Market-by-market detail below.

Terms. Non-resident mortgages typically run 15-20 years, occasionally stretched to 25 or even 30 at select banks. Interest-only structures exist but are, in practice, reserved for private-banking relationships rather than a standard villa purchase.

Documentation. Expect to produce a valid passport, two to three years of home-country tax returns, three to six months of bank statements, a home-country credit report, full source-of-funds and AML documentation, and a local attorney to handle the conveyance. None of that is unusual by Canadian or US standards — it's the cross-border verification of all of it that slows the file down.

Timeline. Budget three to six months from application to funding. Some of that is the bank's own underwriting — Cayman lenders alone can take three months just to approve a file — and on licence-regime islands, that licence has to clear before the bank releases funds, stacking extra weeks or months onto the bank's own process.

The costs nobody mentions on the first call. Beyond the rate: a bank arrangement fee of roughly 1% of the loan (up to 2% at some banks), mandatory property insurance assigned to the lender, and, on several islands, a life insurance policy also assigned as security. It shows up on your closing statement, not the brochure.

I've seen this play out more than once: a buyer arrives with a Canadian or US bank pre-approval in hand and assumes a Caribbean lender will move at the same speed and offer the same leverage. It never does — and that mismatch, more than anything else, is what blows up a closing timeline.

The nine markets side by side

Everything below this table is the detail behind it. If you're deciding where to buy rather than how to finance a specific house, start here.

* Figures marked with an asterisk are the regional norm or the currency-union benchmark rather than a rate I hold in writing from a named bank on that island. Nothing in this table is a quote. It's the range I use to sanity-check the one a bank eventually gives you, and every line of it should be confirmed in writing before it goes into your budget.

How does financing differ in developed markets — Barbados, the Bahamas, and Cayman?

These three have no foreign-ownership restrictions on real estate, the widest choice of banks, and the most developed local mortgage market — which is exactly why financing here looks closest to what a North American buyer expects.

Barbados has no alien landholding licence at all; foreigners buy freehold with no restriction, provided the purchase funds are registered with the Central Bank of Barbados to preserve the right to repatriate proceeds later. Lenders will go up to roughly 70% LTV for non-residents on terms to 25 years. RBC, CIBC Caribbean, Scotiabank, and Republic Bank all lend here, with advertised residential rates starting around 5.5-6% — treat those as teaser rates aimed at residents rather than a guaranteed non-resident quote, since foreign borrowers typically price a point or more higher.

The Bahamas runs a similar structure: no pre-purchase permit needed for a condominium or a home you'll occupy yourself, just post-closing registration with the Investments Board, though a permit has to be obtained in advance where the purchase is undeveloped land that would leave you holding two or more contiguous acres, or where the property is for rental or commercial use. Bahamian banks quote non-resident terms of roughly 30-50% down, 15-25 year amortizations, and rates in the 6-8% range for foreign borrowers — even though the domestic average residential rate sat at 5.17% in the most recent central bank data, a figure that blends in resident local-currency lending. Non-Bahamians also pay a flat 10% VAT on the conveyance, versus a graduated 2.5-10% for Bahamians, customarily split with the seller.

Cayman is where I most often hear people repeat outdated numbers, so I'll date-stamp mine rather than pretend it's permanent. As of the most recent cut I have on record — effective December 2025 — local bank prime sat at 6.75% at Butterfield and Scotiabank & Trust Cayman, the third cut of late 2025, down from 7.25% in September and 7.00% in October. Mortgages price off that prime rate plus a margin of roughly 1-3%, putting a realistic non-resident rate closer to 7.75-9.75%, not the 4-6% some buyers still expect. That prime number is the most specific figure in this article and therefore the one most likely to have moved since: it's a policy-driven rate that changed three times in four months, so ask the bank for today's prime before you underwrite anything off mine. Named lenders working with foreign buyers include Butterfield, Cayman National, CIBC Caribbean, RBC, Scotiabank & Trust, and Proven Bank, typically to about 70% LTV over 20 years. Cayman also just got more expensive to close in: stamp duty on transfers of CI$2 million or more rose from 7.5% to 10% effective January 1, 2026, and the mortgage itself carries its own stamp duty — 1% up to CI$300,000, 1.5% above that.

What about developing markets — Antigua, Nevis and St. Kitts, and St. Lucia?

These islands require a foreign buyer to clear an alien or non-citizens landholding licence before closing — and a mortgage can't fund until it does.

In Antigua, the Non-Citizens Landholding Licence costs 5% of the property's value and typically takes three to six months to process. Local and regional bank mortgages to foreign borrowers are available, but quoted rates run higher than in the developed markets — roughly 6.5-9%, with most falling in the 7-8% band as of early 2026.

St. Kitts & Nevis charges 10% for its Alien Landholding Licence, waived entirely for buyers using an approved citizenship-by-investment property — one reason CBI-approved real estate is such a popular route here. I work out of the Four Seasons Nevis office with St. Kitts & Nevis Sotheby's International Realty, and financing conversations about Nevis real estate typically run through Bank of Nevis, Republic Bank, or CIBC Caribbean — workable, but with fewer lenders competing for the file than in Barbados or Cayman.

St. Lucia is the outlier worth knowing about: its licensing cost isn't a percentage of price at all. Under the Alien Landholding (Licensing) Act passed in March 2020, you buy a Certificate of Eligibility first — US$3,000 for one year or US$10,000 for ten — and then pay a licence fee tiered by acreage: US$100 for a subdivided lot, US$2,500 up to one acre, US$5,000 for one to five acres, US$10,500 for five to ten acres, and US$20,000 above ten acres, with a US$3,000-per-acre-per-year penalty if you sit on land without developing it. Budget three to six months for the two-step process — eligibility, then licence, routed through Planning, the Attorney General's Chambers and Cabinet for anything over an acre — occasionally faster.

For a high-value villa, that structure is dramatically cheaper than the 10% ad-valorem fees elsewhere, and it's a detail I make sure every St. Lucia buyer understands before they assume the region's licence costs are uniform. One warning that matters more than the numbers themselves: an EC$5,000 application fee still circulates widely online, and it is the pre-2020 regime. Check which Act your source is quoting before you budget from it — I set the current schedule out in full in what an alien landholding licence actually costs and how long it takes.

What a financed purchase actually costs: a US$800,000 Nevis villa

Prose numbers are easy to nod along to, so here's the arithmetic on the file I'm asked about most often. A US$800,000 villa on Nevis, financed at 60% loan-to-value over twenty years at 8% — the middle of the band a Bank of Nevis, Republic Bank or CIBC Caribbean quote tends to land in for a non-resident.

• Loan: US$480,000. Deposit: US$320,000.
• Monthly payment: about US$4,015 in principal and interest.
• Total interest over the twenty years: roughly US$483,600 — more than the loan itself. That is what an 8% coupon does over two decades, and it's the single number that most often changes a client's mind about financing at all.
• Bank arrangement fee: US$4,800 at 1% of the loan; US$9,600 if your bank charges 2%.
• Alien Landholding Licence: US$80,000 at 10% of value — or zero if the villa sits on the approved-developments list and you're buying it as part of a St. Kitts & Nevis citizenship application.
• Insurance: property cover assigned to the lender, plus a life policy also assigned as security on several islands. I deliberately won't put a number on this one. In a hardening market the premium is the line that varies most between two houses on the same beach — get a written quote on the actual property before you model anything.

Cash to close: roughly US$404,800 — deposit, arrangement fee and licence — before insurance, legal fees and the assurance-fund contribution. Buy the identical villa as CBI-approved real estate and the licence disappears, taking you to about US$324,800. An US$80,000 swing on the same house is why I ask about the licence before I ask about the rate.

Now run the same file at 50% LTV, which is where a smaller-island lender is more likely to land a first-time foreign borrower: the deposit goes to US$400,000 and cash to close to roughly US$484,000. That's the point in the conversation where most buyers I work with stop asking about mortgages and start asking about vendor financing — and it's why I want the LTV question answered before anyone falls in love with a house.

And the frontier markets — Dominica, St. Vincent, and Grenada?

This is where the numbers get genuinely harder, and where I tell clients most plainly: have a cash Plan B.

For these three the honest working number is the currency union's, not the island's — and that isn't a gap in the research, it's how thin these markets are. Average commercial lending across the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union — which includes all three, along with Antigua and St. Kitts & Nevis — has run around 8.2%, with the gap between what banks pay for deposits and what they charge for loans holding at roughly 6-6.4 percentage points every year from 2018 through 2025. Assume 8% and change, budget for it, and be pleasantly surprised if a named bank comes in under it in writing. That spread is the underlying cost structure of small, thin banking markets built on the EC dollar, pegged at EC$2.70 to US$1 since 1976 — fifty years old in 2026 — and it's remarkably stable, which is precisely why it works as a planning number.

Dominica charges its 10% Alien Landholding fee on all foreign purchases regardless of size — though the formal licence itself is only required above one acre for a residential purchase or three acres for commercial, under the underlying Act. Grenada charges the same 10%, waived for approved CBI purchases, and its banks also cap non-national debt-service ratios around 40% of gross income while typically asking foreign buyers for 20-30% down versus 10-20% for nationals. St. Vincent and the Grenadines requires the licence for every foreign buyer — some sources suggest Canouan and Mustique operate under different structures, so have SVG counsel confirm the position for the specific parcel rather than assuming a waiver; expect roughly three months for licence approval and total closing costs — including a 5% stamp duty — near 16% of the purchase price.

The bank list here is short and local: Republic Bank, which absorbed Scotiabank's book across Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and St. Kitts & Nevis in 2019, plus National Bank of Dominica, Grenada Co-operative Bank, and Bank of St. Vincent and the Grenadines — most of which picked up their foreign-buyer mortgage portfolios only after Scotiabank, RBC, or CIBC sold out of these markets between 2019 and 2023. Fewer lenders means less appetite for financing a foreign buyer's second home, and it shows up in both the leverage they'll offer and how long they take to say yes.

More than one buyer has tried to finance a villa purchase in Dominica or Grenada, come up short on speed or leverage from the bank, and ended up choosing between vendor financing, an all-cash close, or walking away.

Why does private financing barely exist as a backup?

In Canada or the US, a buyer who doesn't fit a bank's box can usually find a private or alternative lender to bridge the gap. In the Caribbean, that market is thin, and it gets thinner the smaller the island. Where private mortgage financing exists at all, rates typically start around 8% — two to three points above prevailing bank rates — usually interest-only, and arranged through a handful of specialist international lenders rather than a walk-in private lender on-island. On islands like Antigua, Turks and Caicos, the BVI, and the USVI, options are limited enough that they run through select international banks or private lenders rather than anything resembling an open market.

The practical fallback on new-build projects is developer or vendor financing — staged payments tied to construction milestones, not a mortgage at all. It's common on off-plan projects regionwide, and deserves the same scrutiny as a bank loan: understand the developer's capital position, not just the payment schedule.

Across my own $75M-plus in Caribbean transactions over the past 18 months, financed purchases have been the minority, and that's typical here: cash buyers close faster, and sellers favor them in a region without abundant financing. My rule of thumb: if a purchase depends on financing that doesn't exist yet, the deal isn't real yet either. Compare financing conditions across every market I work in, and if you're weighing a specific island's financing picture against your timeline, book a call to walk through it.

Key takeaways

• Foreign buyers can get a Caribbean mortgage, but expect 50-70% loan-to-value, not the 80-90% common at home.
• Rates vary enormously by market maturity: roughly 5-7% in Barbados, the Bahamas, and Cayman versus 7-10%-plus in developing and frontier markets, plus arrangement fees and mandatory insurance on top.
• Underwriting runs three to six months, and on licence-regime islands — Antigua, St. Kitts & Nevis, Grenada, Dominica, St. Vincent — the landholding licence has to clear before the bank will fund.
• Cash to close is the number to model first, not the rate: a US$800,000 Nevis villa at 60% LTV needs roughly US$404,800 in cash before insurance and legal fees — or about US$324,800 if the property is CBI-approved and the 10% licence falls away.
• Scotiabank, RBC, and CIBC exited most of the smaller Eastern Caribbean markets between 2019 and 2023; Republic Bank and indigenous banks are now the primary lenders there.
• Private and alternative financing is thin, especially on smaller islands — a developer payment plan or an all-cash close is often the real fallback.

Frequently asked questions

Can a foreigner get a mortgage on a Caribbean villa? Yes, in most Caribbean markets, though terms are tighter than at home: expect 50-70% loan-to-value, rates roughly 5-7% in Barbados, the Bahamas, and Cayman and 7-10%-plus in developing and frontier markets, and three to six months to close.

Which Caribbean islands have the best mortgage options for foreign buyers? Barbados, the Bahamas, and Cayman have the deepest lending markets — no foreign-ownership restrictions, multiple competing banks, and LTVs up to about 70%. Smaller islands with landholding-licence regimes and fewer banks, like Dominica, Grenada, and St. Vincent, offer thinner options and higher rates.

How long does it take to get a mortgage on a Caribbean property? Budget three to six months from application to funding. That includes standard bank underwriting, which can itself run three months or more in some markets, plus, on licence-regime islands, the time to clear an alien or non-citizens landholding licence before the bank will release funds.

How much cash do I need to close on a financed Caribbean villa? More than the deposit. On a US$800,000 Nevis villa at 60% loan-to-value, the deposit is US$320,000, the bank arrangement fee about US$4,800 at 1% of the loan, and the 10% Alien Landholding Licence US$80,000 — roughly US$404,800 before insurance, legal fees and the assurance-fund contribution. If the property is CBI-approved, the licence is waived and that figure drops to about US$324,800.

Is private or alternative financing available for Caribbean real estate? It exists but is limited, especially on smaller islands. Where available, private lenders typically charge two to three points above prevailing bank rates on an interest-only basis. Developer or vendor financing tied to construction milestones is a more common fallback on new-build projects.

Do I need a second citizenship to get a Caribbean mortgage? No. Mortgage eligibility and citizenship by investment are separate questions. Banks lend to foreign buyers regardless of passport, though CBI-approved properties in places like St. Kitts & Nevis and Grenada can waive the landholding-licence fee — which changes your total cost of ownership, not your ability to finance it.