These Five Market Indicators Are Your Keys To Profits In 2015
This could be the best time in our lifetimes to be shopping for overseas property investment opportunities. The world is alive right now with markets in crisis, markets benefiting from the strong dollar (and the weak euro), markets where the middle class is expanding in dramatic ways for particular reasons, and markets irresistibly interesting for the production of particular crops.
I intend to seize this window of opportunity, and I encourage you to do the same. I have a number of key property markets in my crosshairs due to the current extraordinary circumstances.
Specifically, here’s how you should be looking to diversify your property investment portfolio in 2015:
Markets In Crisis
Key markets are entering, exiting, or currently struggling through crises. Certain pockets within these crisis areas—including in Argentina, Spain, Ireland, and elsewhere—will be ripe with opportunities this year. That is to say, this year you will be able to invest in some of the world’s most valuable real estate at fire-sale prices, if you can get the timing and location right.
Argentina in particular has my attention. I invested here during their last crisis, in 2001, and I doubled my money in less than three years. I see the same potential in certain areas of the country in 2015.
The Surging Dollar
Whether or not you see the dollar failing in the future is irrelevant. Right now, Americans and other dollar holders enjoy what amounts to a whopping discount on international property valued in particular other currencies. The savings can easily amount to tens of thousands of dollars and more.
To say predicting currency exchange rates is tough would be an understatement, so I don’t try. However, I also know enough to act when opportunity is banging my door down. I’m a dollar investor. That means key markets are more affordable for me right now than they’ve been in years. I intend to act. I recommend you seriously consider acting, too.
The Expanding Global Middle Class
What separates North America and Europe from much of the rest of the world is their big middle classes. However, as technology, investment, and education develop and expand globally, other countries’ middle classes are growing, in some cases in significant ways.
An expanding middle class means more families looking to buy or rent property, which is music to the ears of us property investors. That said, not all expanding middle classes are created equal. Other factors come into play when sizing up a market in this phase of development.
I’m watching four markets in particular in this context, including Istanbul, Turkey. Values are a bargain in Istanbul, especially when you consider that this is one of the world’s premier cities. The demographics in this city are set to change in a big way.
Half the population of Turkey is younger than 30 years old. That’s nearly 40 million people who will soon join the workforce, have families, and buy homes. Many among these are migrating to megacity Istanbul. The demand is growing, the supply is already severely lacking. Can you say opportunity?
Improving Infrastructure
One of the key tenants of my global property investing strategy is to follow the path of progress. Simply put, the more a market’s infrastructure improves, the more valuable the market. You can get ahead of the price curve by identifying markets with emerging infrastructure improvements. Of course, it’s not that simple. Context is critical.
One market I have targeted in this context for 2015 is a growing Caribbean beach town founded in part by French and German expatriates. This place is a bit of an anomaly in the Caribbean. The local scene leans European, including the town planning and the food. More relevant for us global property investors, a new highway was recently built to allow easy access from the country’s capital. Property values are poised to increase over the coming few years. Today they remain a bargain.
Agriculture
The world’s population is exploding, while the available farmland is shrinking. It’s a big-deal growing demand/undersupply situation that adds up to a no-brainer for the investor. I’ve been focused on agricultural investment opportunities for the past five years but am more so this year than ever. I have identified four productive land opportunities specifically that promise returns of 20% and beyond, often over a term of multiple decades.
I’ll say it again: We global property investors haven’t been presented with a window of such enormous opportunity as we are now in 2015 ever before in our lifetimes.
You should be acting…now.
Happy profits,
Lief Simon
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