The South African Revenue Service (Sars) is about to gain unprecedented visibility into your offshore life. A new global tax agreement means Sars will soon automatically receive detailed information about every foreign immovable property owned by South African taxpayers across more than 20 countries.

This follows a new international initiative to exchange data on offshore immovable property.

It includes your holiday villa in Portugal, your investment apartment in France, and your Airbnb in Spain. If you own foreign immovable property and still remain a South African tax resident, that information will soon be in Sars’s hands and making any rental income or capital gains from these properties fall squarely into South Africa’s residency-based tax net.

South Africa is among 25 jurisdictions that have formally signalled their intention to be part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) new reporting framework which enables the automatic exchange of information on non-financial assets, especially immovable property to strengthen global tax law enforcement. This update will further equip Sars with more detailed information on taxpayers’ assets and investment portfolios, particularly offshore property, and will improve Sars’s ability to potentially collect taxes that may otherwise have been lost to the South African fiscus.

Other participating jurisdictions to the new framework are Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Lithuania, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom’s Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.

In a joint statement on 4 December 2025, the jurisdictions noted that ownership and transactions involving immovable property increasingly have cross-border elements. They highlighted the need for improved mechanisms to ensure that tax authorities have access to relevant information on non-financial assets - particularly immovable property held abroad and any income derived from such assets. 

The OECD’s new framework, the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement on Automatic Exchange of Readily Available Information on Immovable Property (IPI MCAA), will close one of the last remaining gaps in global tax transparency.

“We therefore welcome the new IPI MCAA between tax authorities developed by the OECD,” Sars said in its statement.

The participating jurisdictions confirmed that until now, global reporting focused only on financial assets and crypto-assets under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), whilst no equivalent system has existed for non-financial assets — particularly foreign immovable property. 

South Africa plans to activate the new reporting rules by 2029 or 2030, after completing its internal legislative process. 

Once automatic property reporting begins, Sars will have full visibility — and may ask why your offshore assets were never declared.

A properly executed tax residency cessation ensures:

• Your foreign assets are not taxed by Sars;
• Foreign rental income is not taxed by Sars;
• Foreign property sales cannot trigger SA capital gains tax; and
• Sars cannot retrospectively question your offshore wealth.

If you are a South African expatriate who has left South Africa permanently, no longer intend to return, and have purchased property abroad, undergoing the Financial Emigration procedure should be a priority before automatic global property reporting goes live. 

Written by Delano Abdoll, Legal Manager: Cross Border Taxation at Tax Consulting SA; and Tasmin Kotze, Tax Legal Associate at Tax Consulting SA