Rentista visa on the income from a mortgaged property.

[JonnyCash]

Have anyone done this before?
I own a property that if rented out can make enough money in monthly payments to qualify for rentista visa, but I haven’t fully paid the mortgage off yet.
Is that gonna be a problem while applying for rentista visa or Migraciones only cares about monthly payments to your bank account and is not interested if a property is mortgaged or not.

I searched through the forum and found one post mentioning a friend who was able to successfully apply for rentista using mortgaged property in the US, but it’s the only mention of this question that I could find. Need a bit more for statistics. And what are your thoughts on this, gonna work?

 

[Alby]

Surprisingly, Migraciones either aren't concerned that the property has a mortgage (that is probably consuming some or all of the rental income up to the threshold that you need to be earning free to bring into Argentina to support yourself) or are not clever enough to see the issue. I had the same concern to you, but it never came up. You have to provide a title document, which presumably will show the mortgage as an encumbrance. So, if they are smart, they will know. You also have to provide bank statements showing the rental income coming in; to disguise things a bit, I made sure that bank account was different to the one showing the mortgage payments going out. Maybe that helped. Or maybe I just got lucky.

Don't expect going down the rentista visa path to be easy or rapid. It may take several years. The preparation and documentation requirements are way beyond Migraciones capacity to process once you finally give them what they (think) they want. They are like the dog that catches the passing car: once they have it, they don't know what to do with it.

 

[JonnyCash]

Thanks for your response, Alby. That’s some good news here. There’s one more thing I’m concerned about though. What if I have a one-year contract with my tenant, but I’ll go and apply for rentista visa after 2-3 months of that contract have already passed. Will they accept that? It’s very uncommon here to make more than one-year contracts, usually everyone rents for one-year only and then either extends a contract for one more or moves out.

 

[Alby]

One of the many serial liars at Migraciones told me initially that there would be problem: that they would only issue a residency for the time remaining on the lease you show them (in your example, for 9-10 months). I am not sure is really true in practice. But they do scrutinize the dates and length of the rental contract and will question you on it. If such things are possible in your jurisdiction, you should write your rental contract to be for twelve months with an automatic month-by-month extension. Migraciones will not understand what this means, and you will have to explain it to them.

As the process will take years, by the time anybody actually starts reviewing your documentation it will be completely out of date. You may already be on your second tenant (and a completely new rental contract) before you even meet the requirements to get to first base, namely, getting your application lodged and your first precaria issued. By the time anybody starts looking in detail at your case, you will probably have had three different tenants and two rental contracts after the one you applied with. You may even have sold the property. Or no longer want residency in Argentina. Or the minimum income you need to show will have shot up and exceed the amount your original rental contract shows. The whole thing becomes a bureaucratic quagmire/joke.

You really need a lawyer to go down the rentista route. But no lawyer who knows anything about the rentista visa will advise you to take this route.

There is really no good news. The only benefit to the rentista residency is that because path they set you is far more complicated than they are capable of administering (and unless you are really organized may also be beyond your capacity to administer), is that once you have the application lodged you obtain a precaria residency that can last the number of years it takes them to process the case. This means you have legal status in Argentina and can do certain things that someone on a tourist visa can't. But those years on the precaria do not count for time served if your objective is permanent residency.

 

[TruchoTango]

In my experience, the rentista residencia was not that difficult. To do it without a lawyer, good spanish is a must. There are several people on this forum who have residencia rentista and they are more than happy to guide a first timer.