Milei's "Blanqueo": How a Tax Amnesty on Hidden Offshore Wealth Engineered the Largest Real Estate Spike in Buenos Aires in Six Years

Argentina's libertarian president reset the entire Buenos Aires property market in 18 months by combining a tax amnesty, rent control abolition, and transfer tax elimination into a policy cocktail unlike anything seen in modern real estate history.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Market • 2026-05-29

When Javier Milei won Argentina's presidency in November 2023, he inherited a country where 220% annual inflation had made ordinary savings instruments functionally useless. Real estate, priced in U.S. dollars and insulated from peso devaluation, had long served as the savings vehicle of last resort for anyone with money to protect. But the market was frozen: a punishing 2020 rent control law had driven landlords off the formal market, vacancy rates had ballooned to 1 in 7 homes citywide, and mortgage credit had essentially ceased to exist. Milei's response was not incremental. It was a simultaneous detonation of three interlocking reforms, each of which would have moved markets on its own. Together, they produced the most dramatic real estate reset Argentina had seen in a generation.

The Blanqueo: $32 Billion Comes in from the Cold

Argentina has always had a parallel economy running beneath the official one. By 2022, INDEC, the country's national statistics bureau, estimated that Argentines held more than $360 billion in undeclared wealth, stashed offshore or in dollar cash outside the banking system. The phenomenon had deep roots: decades of currency controls, hyperinflation episodes, and outright government confiscation of dollar deposits in the 2001 crisis had trained ordinary Argentines to distrust banks and hide savings. The result was a country with enormous latent liquidity floating outside the formal economy, untaxable and largely uninvestable at scale.

Milei's administration moved quickly to capture it. Law 27.743, enacted in mid-2024, established the "Blanqueo 2024" asset regularization regime. The terms were deliberately generous: the first $100,000 declared was entirely tax-free. Amounts above that threshold were taxed at 10% through December 2024, rising to 15% through March 2025. The amnesty extended to all asset classes, including foreign bank accounts, real estate holdings abroad, cryptocurrency, vehicles, and equity stakes.

The results exceeded expectations. In the program's first phase alone, Argentina's ARCA (the successor to the dissolved federal tax agency AFIP) reported that 104,390 taxpayers opened 300,967 special accounts, depositing a total of $19 billion in cash. By the time the program officially closed at year-end 2024, the total declared across both phases reached $32.15 billion: $22.16 billion in cash deposited to special bank accounts, plus an additional $9.99 billion in other assets including real estate, vehicles, and corporate equity stakes. Among the non-cash declarations were 11,233 properties, with 10,817 located inside Argentina and 416 abroad.

The scale of that inflow into the banking system was unlike anything Argentina had seen in years. Private dollar deposits hit a record $34.17 billion on November 4, 2024, the peak of the blanqueo window. Much of it did not stay in cash for long.

From Bank Accounts to Apartment Deeds

The channeling of blanqueo proceeds into Buenos Aires real estate was immediate and measurable. August 2024 saw 5,297 property transaction deeds recorded in Buenos Aires City, the highest single-month figure since May 2018, a number that closely mirrored the peak of the UVA mortgage lending boom under the prior Macri administration. September broke it: the monthly total crossed 5,000 deeds again for the first time in six years, recording the highest volume since the currency restrictions that had strangled the market were first imposed by the Kirchner government in 2011.

For the full year 2024, Buenos Aires City logged 54,761 property sales transactions, up 35.1% from the year prior and the highest annual total since 2018, according to the Colegio de Escribanos de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. The momentum continued into 2025. In the first seven months of the year, transactions rose a further 45.3% year-over-year to 36,179 units. The total value of transactions jumped 123.4% in peso terms year-on-year to ARS 976.9 billion, or roughly $662 million at prevailing rates.

In dollar terms, the price story was equally striking. The median sale price across major Argentine cities stood at USD 355,000 as of mid-2025. Property prices in Buenos Aires rose 38.9% year-over-year in dollar terms, driven by genuine demand recovery alongside the continued erosion of the peso against hard currency. Even accounting for that dynamic, the number of physical transactions and the dollar value of what was changing hands represented a structural shift, not a statistical mirage.

The blanqueo was not the only force driving the numbers. Milei also eliminated the 1.5% property transfer tax in July 2024, reducing friction at the point of sale. And for the first time since the Macri years, banks began offering UVA-indexed peso mortgages again in June 2024. By mid-2025, the mortgage-to-deed ratio had exceeded 15%, doubling the average of the prior five years and reaching its highest level since 2018. Nearly 14,000 of the 69,461 deeds recorded in Buenos Aires in 2025 were financed by mortgage.

The Rent Control Demolition

While the blanqueo was driving the ownership market, a separate but simultaneous reform was transforming Buenos Aires rentals from a crisis into a case study.

The 2020 Rental Law, enacted under former President Alberto Fernandez, had been one of the more consequential examples of market distortion in recent Argentine history. Its design seemed protective: it mandated three-year lease terms, required rent to be paid in pesos, and capped rent adjustments to once per year using a central bank index. In practice, with inflation running at over 200%, those constraints were lethal for landlords. A lease signed in 2020 at a fixed adjustment formula was, by 2022, effectively paying rent in currency that had lost most of its value. Landlords responded rationally: they fled the formal rental market. Some migrated to Airbnb, where short-term rentals could be priced in dollars. The Buenos Aires Airbnb inventory exploded from 10,000 listings in 2019 to 29,500 by January 2024. Others simply left units vacant rather than lock them into a three-year peso agreement with no exit clause.

By late 2023, an estimated 1 in 7 homes in Buenos Aires sat empty. Simultaneously, the supply of long-term rental listings on Zonaprop, Argentina's dominant property site, had fallen 53% from June 2020 to December 2023. Diego Nocera, a Buenos Aires real estate agent with 25 years in the market, told the Financial Times: "In the last three years, the normal rental offer has shrunk to a size I have never seen."

Milei repealed the law on December 29, 2023, his third week in office. His administration's broader decree also formalized something his Foreign Minister Diana Mondino had announced days earlier: contracts in Argentina could now be denominated in any currency the parties agreed upon, whether or not it was legal tender. "We ratify and confirm that in Argentina, contracts can be agreed upon in Bitcoin," Mondino said on X, "and also any other crypto and/or commodity." Within weeks, a landlord in Rosario, Argentina's third-largest city, executed the country's first Bitcoin-denominated rental contract, with the tenant paying 100 USDT per month through Fiwind, a local crypto exchange.

The supply response was immediate. By June 2024, rental listings on Zonaprop had increased 184%, with a 62% jump in May alone. The Ministry of Deregulation, drawing on Mercado Libre and Universidad de San Andres data, reported that by June 2024, the rental housing supply in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area was 212% higher than it had been in December 2023. Even as more units flooded the market, landlords could now price them honestly. The average one-bedroom apartment rent increased 61% in cash terms over 2024, which sounds alarming until you note that inflation ran at roughly 120% the same year. In real terms, rents fell. The government's own data showed real rental prices declining nearly 27% in the seven months following deregulation. Inflation-adjusted rents fell approximately 40%.

Lucas Llach, an economist associated with the Milei government, called the result "a textbook case" for the administration's deregulatory approach.

A Reset, Not a Recovery

What happened in Buenos Aires real estate between late 2023 and mid-2025 is not best described as a market recovery. A recovery implies returning to prior conditions. What Argentina's capital experienced was a system reset: four simultaneous structural changes that each addressed a different layer of market dysfunction.

Rent control abolition unlocked supply that had been deliberately suppressed. The blanqueo amnesty unlocked capital that had been sitting offshore or in mattresses for years, unable to enter formal markets. The property transfer tax elimination reduced transaction cost friction that had disincentivized turnover. And the contract currency liberalization created legal infrastructure for dollar and crypto-denominated transactions that the market had been conducting informally for years anyway.

Critics note that not all participants benefited equally. Tenant advocates in Buenos Aires argued that the rent deregulation, while increasing supply, also removed protections for lower-income renters who had depended on peso-denominated leases in a country where dollar income was not universal. Some analysts pointed out that the blanqueo's fiscal take was smaller than the headline declared totals suggested, given the rotation strategies some families used to declare the same $100,000 twice under each phase's tax-free window by recycling cash through family members. The true net new capital entering the system was real but likely below the gross figures.

Even so, the transaction numbers are not synthetic. The 5,297 deeds recorded in August 2024 represent actual property changing hands. The 69,461 deeds in 2025, the highest annual figure in Buenos Aires Province since 2005, represent a market with a functioning supply side, a revived credit mechanism, and a capital base that has been formally brought into investable form.

Argentina's real estate market has been through cycles before. The question for the next phase is whether the structural conditions that produced this reset, including Milei's broader fiscal consolidation and the IMF's $20 billion backstop approved in April 2025, are durable enough to sustain it when the amnesty tailwind fades. The answer depends not on real estate mechanics but on whether Argentina can hold together a reform program that has, for the first time in years, made its own property market worth betting on.