A safer option is to form a paper company. A corporation can own land, and you can up to 40 percent of the corporation. If the corporation is set up carefully, you can effectively control the entire corporation, thereby effectively owning the land. One person alone cannot incorporate a company, and you will need Filipino incorporators who will technically own sixty percent of your company. Although you will be providing all of the capital for the corporation, on paper it will look as if your friends invested 60 percent to form the company.

The foreign national must ensure that the incorporators who own sixty percent of the company are not only friendly to him/her, but - and this is very important - that they do not know each other. If you get your friend and his or her relatives to sign up for the entire sixty percent, you might end up with nothing, just as is the case when you put 100 percent of the property in someone else's name. To prevent those who own 60 percent from ganging up on you and putting their clout together and sidelining you in your own company, it is critical that you ask only friends with no mutual contact to become incorporators of your company. In addition, you can ask your acquaintance to pre-sign a blank deed of sale for his/her shares in your company. That way, if you have an eventual falling out, or your acquaintance moves abroad, you can easily transfer his/her shares to another friend.

The incorporation of a company can be handled by any competent attorney and costs about US $500, not including the show money required for the capitalization (which will have to sit in a bank account for about a week). Perhaps the greatest difficulty will be the task of finding six people who know you well enough to be willing to sign up as partial owners of your company. Since incorporators are liable for the activities of the corporation they own, it is natural for people to be reluctant to sign up for ownership of a company controlled by an acquaintance whom one they do not know well.

A third loophole often exploited is to lease the property rather than to buy it. A perpetual lease can be arranged and, provided the legal documentation has been handled by an experienced and able attorney, is a good way of controlling property. The are only two potential problems. First, the seller may not be comfortable about selling the land in the form of a lease. Second, some buyers may feel somewhat insecure about living on land one they don't technically own. It should be noted, however, that buildings can be owned irrespective of who owns the land the building is on.