This is the pillar post for the Sovereign Canadian international real estate series — the map that sits above every country deep-dive. Like everything here, it’s personal documentation of how I’m thinking about my own portfolio, not financial or legal advice. I’m figuring this out in public, country by country, and writing down what I learn.

Foreign real estate investing for Canadians usually starts with a feeling, not a spreadsheet. You’re standing on a beach in February — or, more likely, looking at a photo of one from your kitchen in Ontario at minus twenty — and something clicks. Why not own a piece of that? The impulse is fine. The problem is that most people never get past the impulse, and the ones who do tend to either overpay for a lifestyle fantasy or talk themselves out of a genuinely good move because the CRA paperwork looked scary from a distance.

I’ve been working through this the slow way: one country at a time, verifying the numbers before I write anything down. This post is the top of that pyramid. It’s the “why” and the “how it’s different when you’re Canadian” — the stuff that’s true whether you end up in the Riviera Maya or the Peloponnese. The individual country posts handle the “where.” This one handles the decision that comes first.