The power of attorney that actually works
You do not need to be in Chile to sell Chilean property. You need a document that a Chilean notary and a Chilean registry will accept, and that is a narrower thing than "a power of attorney".
Chilean practice expects the power to identify the property precisely — by its registration details in the relevant Conservador de Bienes Raíces, not merely by street address — and to authorise the specific acts required: to sell, to agree the price and the payment terms, to sign the public deed, to receive the price, to request registration. A power drafted abroad in general terms, however properly executed, is regularly rejected at the counter.
Where this goes wrong: the rejection is discovered on the signing day, with the buyer present, the funds arranged and the seller on another continent asleep. Re-executing a power abroad and getting it apostilled takes weeks. Have the draft prepared in Chile and sent to you for execution, rather than executed abroad and sent to Chile to be assessed.
Apostille or consulate
Two routes get a foreign-signed document accepted in Chile.
Apostille. The Hague Apostille Convention entered into force for Chile on 30 August 2016, implemented by Law 20.711. A document executed before a notary in another member state and apostilled by that state's competent authority is accepted in Chile without further legalisation. This replaced a slower chain that ran through the Chilean consulate and the foreign ministry.
Chilean consulate. Signing before a Chilean consular officer in your country remains available and is sometimes simpler, particularly where the document is drafted in Spanish and you are in a country that is not a Convention member.
Where the document is not in Spanish, an official translation will be required. Building that time into the schedule is part of the job.
Capital gains: the allowance and how it is counted
Chile taxes the gain on the sale of real estate under the Income Tax Law. For individuals the regime includes an allowance expressed in Unidades de Fomento, and the single most misunderstood feature of it is that the allowance is cumulative over the taxpayer's lifetime, not applied afresh to each sale. Someone who has already used it on an earlier disposal does not get it again on this one.
Beyond that, the outcome turns on facts that have to be established from documents rather than assumed: when the property was acquired, how it was acquired, and what the acquisition cost was in terms the law recognises — which is not always what was paid. Where the property has been held for a long time, the difference between two defensible ways of establishing cost can be substantial.
The UF is an inflation-indexed unit that changes daily, so any figure quoted in pesos is a snapshot. Work in UF and convert at the end.
If the property came from an estate
Inherited property has its own cost-basis rules, and they frequently work in the heirs' favour — but only where the estate file was built correctly. The valuation adopted when the estate was processed, and the way the inheritance tax position was handled, both feed into the gain calculated years later when the property is sold.
This is the argument for treating the estate and the eventual sale as one project rather than two. Families who process the estate as cheaply as possible, with no thought to the sale, routinely pay for it on the disposal. See our guide on inheriting from abroad.
Getting the proceeds out of Chile
This is the step nobody plans for and everybody asks about afterwards.
Chile does not prohibit a foreign seller from taking sale proceeds out of the country. What happens in practice is that a Chilean bank, asked to transfer a significant sum abroad on behalf of a non-resident, applies its own anti-money-laundering and source-of-funds procedures — and those procedures are designed around Chilean residents with Chilean banking histories.
Expect to document the chain: how the property was acquired, that the sale was properly registered, and that the tax position was settled. Assembling that after the sale, from abroad, with the money sitting in a Chilean account, is considerably harder than assembling it before.
By Felipe Andrés Solar Rojas, partner · Published 21 September 2026 · Last reviewed 21 September 2026
Heads the real estate, wealth structuring and company advisory practice at Iriarte & Solar. His work runs through Chilean notaries, the Conservadores de Bienes Raíces, the Internal Revenue Service and municipal works departments. Full profile (in Spanish).
Sources: Chilean Civil Code, article 686, at Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional · LeyChile. Income Tax Law, contained in article 1 of Decree Law 824, at Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional · LeyChile. Law 20.711, implementing the Hague Apostille Convention, at Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional · LeyChile.
This guide states the general rule in force at the date of last review. It is not legal advice for a specific matter, and it is not a substitute for advice on your own documents. Amounts expressed in UF move daily. Every transaction has features that can change the conclusions set out here.