Your whole mortgage in Portuguese, from a broker who lived four years in Brazil

If you are Brazilian and buying a home in Alberta, you can do your whole mortgage in Portuguese with a broker who knows both systems first-hand. In a typical year, 30 to 40% of my clients are Brazilian, through referrals from past clients and Brazilian realtor partners like Amanda Lima, and helping this community is one of the most meaningful parts of my work. Prefere ler em português? Esta página existe em português: Hipotecas para Brasileiros.

Why a Canadian broker speaks Portuguese

I lived in Brazil for four years, first in Belo Horizonte and then in Vila Velha, where I ran a small business by the beach. The mineiros took me in, taught me Portuguese, and made me part of my Brazilian family. My wife Paula is Brazilian, our three boys consider themselves Canadian-Brazilian, and we keep as much Portuguese in our house as we can. I know exactly what it feels like to be the immigrant learning a new system in a second language, because I was that person in Brazil, and people lifted me up. Now I get to return the favour on this side, alongside people like Amanda Lima on the realtor side and Alex and Gustavo at Samba Brazilian Market, the kind of community builders who make Alberta feel a little more like home.

Can you buy right now? Your status decides, and the rule changes on January 1, 2027

The federal ban on residential purchases by non-Canadians took effect on January 1, 2023 and was extended in 2024 to January 1, 2027. It causes more anxiety in the Brazilian community than almost anything else, and most of that anxiety is misplaced, because the ban has never applied to Canadian citizens or permanent residents and it exempts a great many people who are neither.

If you hold a valid work permit, you are exempt when 183 or more days remain on it at the time of purchase and you have not already bought a home in Canada while the ban has been in force. Students face a harder test: tax returns filed for each of the five preceding years, physical presence in Canada of at least 244 days in each of those five years, no previous purchase during the ban, and a purchase price no higher than $500,000. Refugees and protected persons are exempt as well. All of it is set out in CMHC’s own FAQ on the Act, which is the document to read rather than anything I or anyone else summarises for you.

Your status	Can you buy under the current rules?	What usually makes the file work	Minimum down payment
Citizen or permanent resident	Yes, and you never were covered	Standard qualifying, or a newcomer program if your Canadian credit file is short	From 5%
Work permit, 183+ days left	Yes, if you have not already bought during the ban	New to Canada, using international credit or a bank reference letter	From 5%
Work permit, under 183 days left	Not inside a city the ban covers	Renewing the permit first is usually the shortest route	From 5% once you qualify
Study permit	Only if the five-year tax and presence tests are met	Rarely the right moment; status and credit usually come first	Case by case
Visitor, or no status yet	Not inside a city the ban covers	Building the file now so nothing is waiting on you later	Not yet available

These are the common cases, not the whole Act, and the down payment column is what the insurer allows rather than what every lender will do. Your own answer takes one conversation to establish.

Where the ban applies, and where it does not

This is the part almost nobody knows. The prohibition only bites inside census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations, which is Statistics Canada’s language for a city plus the commuter belt around it. A metropolitan area needs 100,000 people with at least 50,000 in the core; an agglomeration needs only 10,000. Calgary and Edmonton are firmly inside, along with the commuter towns around them. Plenty of smaller Alberta communities are not, and in those places the ban simply does not apply.

That matters more in Alberta than in most provinces, because so much of the province sits outside those boundaries. It is also the single easiest thing to get wrong, since the boundaries are drawn around commuting patterns rather than town signs, and a community you would call rural can sit inside an agglomeration you have never heard of. I check the specific address rather than the general area, because the difference between the two is a legal one.

The Act’s other edges are worth knowing too. It covers buildings with three dwelling units or fewer, so a fourplex or larger is outside it. A breach carries a fine of up to $10,000 and a court can order the property sold, with the seller’s recovery capped at what they paid.

Down payments that start in Brazil

Many of my Brazilian clients fund their down payment by selling a property back home, and documenting that, meaning the sale, the deposit, and the transfer to Canada, is where files get stressful. I have done this many times, and I have found lending partners with Brazilians on their underwriting teams, which means a sales agreement in Portuguese can often be reviewed as-is instead of paying for certified translations. Knowing which lender to send a Brazilian file to is half the battle, and that is exactly what I know.

Start the paper trail before you need it. A Brazilian sale that is documented from the beginning, the contract, the deposit and the transfer into your Canadian account, moves through a pre-approval as easily as any other down payment. The same money with no trail behind it can hold a file up for weeks, and it is always harder to reconstruct after the fact than to record as it happens.

Moving the money, and when to start

The hard part of a Brazilian file is almost never the income or the credit. Those we work through in a pre-approval, and there is usually a route. It is the down payment, and more precisely how the money travelled to get here. The plan is the same on nearly every file: move it early, land it in one account, and leave it alone.

Early matters for two reasons. Some lenders want the money sitting in a Canadian account for more than 30 days before closing, so a transfer made in the week of possession can be the thing that moves your closing date. And a sale in Brazil pays out on the contract’s schedule rather than yours. I have had clients who did everything right, followed their contract exactly, and still had to wait for the money to be released. That is workable when we know in month one and expensive when we find out in the last week.

One account matters just as much. Money that sits across several Brazilian accounts, then comes to Canada, then moves between accounts here has to be traced at every step, and every step needs a document. Brazilian bank statements are laid out differently from Canadian ones, so somebody has to read each hop and match it to the next. Two or three moves turn a file that should be simple into a reconstruction job. Send it to one account, let it sit, and the question stops existing.

Business owners are where the trail is usually weakest. If you own a company in Brazil and money has moved between the business and your personal accounts, that is ordinary and it is explainable, but it gets explained with documents rather than with a sentence. The earlier we look at it, the smaller that job is.

None of this disqualifies anyone. We can work with all of it, and I have. It is a timing problem rather than a lending problem, which is exactly why I would rather hear from you before the money moves than after.

Your Brazilian credit history does not travel, but something else can

Canadian credit bureaus receive nothing from Brazil, so most newcomers open their first Canadian file at zero. That is not the obstacle it looks like. Under New to Canada programs, an international credit report or a reference letter from your bank in Brazil can stand in for a Canadian history, and records of rent and utility payments help as well. CMHC’s Newcomers program asks for a minimum credit score of 600 from at least one borrower or guarantor, on owner-occupied homes priced below $1.5 million, and sets the minimum down payment at 5% for newcomers with permission to work in Canada, not only for permanent residents. That last point is worth reading at the source, because a lot of people are still told they need 10% or 20% without PR.

Where the file does not work yet, the fix is usually time rather than money. A credit card used lightly and paid in full, a car loan carried to term, rent paid on a record somebody can verify: two years of that is often exactly what turns a decline into an approval. If you will be buying your first home in Canada, the first-time buyer page covers the programs that stack on top of this. I would rather build you that plan on the first call than watch you get turned down at a branch and conclude that Canada does not lend to Brazilians.

What Alberta does not charge you

British Columbia and Ontario both add a tax on purchases by foreign buyers, on top of a land transfer tax that applies to everyone. Alberta has neither. There is no foreign buyer tax here and no provincial land transfer tax at all; you pay land title registration fees instead, which are small by comparison. Combined with prices well below Toronto and Vancouver, it is a large part of why the Brazilian community in Alberta keeps growing, and it is worth putting in front of family still deciding where in Canada to land.

Em português ou em inglês, você escolhe

Some clients want everything in Portuguese, some want English so they can practise, and most want a mix. We go step by step at your pace, and if nobody has ever explained to you how Canadian mortgages actually work, that you may only need 5% down, or how the stress test affects your budget, I love teaching it. I got so much help when I was the newcomer; helping Brazilians get their start in Canada is my way of paying it back.

What happens when you get in touch

The first conversation is a conversation. You tell me your status, roughly what you earn and where you earn it, and where the down payment is coming from, and I will tell you whether you can buy now, what you could borrow, or what has to change first. Twenty to thirty minutes, no credit check just to talk, in Portuguese if you prefer.

Newcomer files attract a lot of bad advice, so for the record: I am a licensed mortgage professional in Alberta, working with BRX Mortgage Inc. and regulated by the Real Estate Council of Alberta (RECA). I have access to 50+ lenders, which matters more here than on any other kind of file, because a newcomer file that one lender declines is often approved by another with no change to the application at all.

Weigh your options

Whether you can buy today depends on your status, where the home is, and where your money is sitting. All three are checkable, and none of them should be guessed at. Vamos descobrir juntos, em português se preferir.