Not too long, a month or two so I think, but don’t take that as anything but a best guess.
Generally the process is, agree to buy and make an offer, draw up private contract at notary paying 5-10% as deposit, papers then go off to the government for processing, once they come back to notary pay final payment and receive deeds.
It is fairly straight forward. The most important thing is to make sure everything is correct and in order before starting. Deeds are really in name of seller and the land is as quoted to you. Also always use independent notary unconnected to seller. Do that and they will pick up any potential problems

Hi Viera, thanks for getting in touch. I should be able to give guidance on all the points you raise. I will send you an email as it is far easier to talk through things in detail that way

Hello Simon;
I plan to move to Luque, San Bernardino, perhaps Aregua area, just waiting for the crimi record check from my home country, likely as a temporary and then permanent resident, not sure about giving up my Canadian citizenship for good, so just as far. I am not a wealthy woman so the plan would be to get the mortgage, even on the 1 bedroom pet friendly (dog) condo or smaller house. What’s the ratio of an average real estate mortgages vs money put down? Do I have a chance in getting the mortgage of 50%-60% of the value of the property? I plan to continue working there once my Spanish gets a bit better but also have to be careful as a single female, so is it realistic? Do they have there Uber drivers? 🙂 Viera

I have been here long enough to see how the numbers coming to join the long standing German communities are in waves, driven by events occurring far from Paraguay. We are now and have been for the past couple of years at the peak of on of those waves.
And on the subject of who owns land in Paraguay there is another issue and belief which is still very much alive today. That is that although it is understood that land belongs to someone it is considered that water belongs to all. So if a stream runs though the middle of someones land it is considered that others have the right to use it and as such any No Entry sign hung across a stream is seen as rather strange and slightly offensive.

The scholar Kregg Hetherington wrote a book about a decade ago looking into land titles and deeds and the bureaucracy around same in Paraguay. (He also later wrote a wonderful work on soy beans and Paraguay, The Government of Beans.):

“Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay – September 14, 2011. Guerrilla Auditors is an ethnographic account of the rise of information, transparency, and good governance in the post–Cold War era, and the effects of these concepts on Paraguay’s transition to democracy. Kregg Hetherington shows that the ideal of transparent information, meant to depoliticize bureaucratic procedures, has become a battleground for a new kind of politics centered on legal interpretation and the manipulation of official documents. In late-twentieth-century Paraguay, peasant land politics moved unexpectedly from the roads and fields into the documentary recesses of state bureaucracy. When peasants, bureaucrats, and development experts encountered one another in state archives, conflicts ensued about how bureaucracy ought to function, what documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past and the future of the nation. Hetherington argues that Paraguay’s neoliberal democracy is predicated, at least in part, on an exclusionary distinction between model citizens and peasants. Despite this, peasant activists have found ways to circumvent their exclusion and in so doing question the conceptual foundations of international development orthodoxy.”