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Find A Local Attorney Overseas Before All Else

Your Local Attorney Will Be Your Strongest Ally When Buying Overseas

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Nov 15, 2020
in How to, Real Estate
0
Attorney explaining paperwork to a senior couple.

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Your most important ally when buying, selling, or renting real estate overseas is your attorney.

First thing, therefore, when beginning to formulate a plan for living or investing in a new country, before you do anything else, find a local attorney you can trust who speaks real English, who has experience working with foreigners…

And, who, perhaps most important of all, works for you… not for the seller, not for the property developer you’re considering buying from, but for you. Sharing doesn’t count. If you’re sharing an attorney with the developer, whose interests come first in his mind when an issue arises?

“Do you mean I need an attorney even to review a rental contract?” asked an attendee at our recent Live and Invest in Europe Conference (stay tuned for the complete bundle of recordings from this event).

“Yes,” I explained, “I mean you should engage an attorney even to review a rental contract.”

In any emerging, unregulated market (like Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, Belize, Ecuador, etc.), you can’t take anything for granted. You must assume that nothing will be as you expect or as you’re accustomed to back home. Not even a simple rental contract.

For, in unregulated markets like these, nothing is standard.

Furthermore, in some countries, any legal document, to be legal, must be in the local language (Spanish, for example), meaning that, unless you read Spanish at a high level, you aren’t going to be able to identify any surprises on your own.

Don’t take for granted that the guy offering to sell you the piece of real estate actually owns that piece of real estate…

Nor that the guy offering to rent you “his” apartment has the right to do so…

Don’t assume that the access to a piece of property across a neighbor’s field in fact conveys with the sale…

Nor that the boundaries stand where the seller or even the real estate agent has indicated…

In any unregulated, emerging market, don’t allow yourself to believe that the real estate agent you’re working with actually works for you. He doesn’t. Not really.

And he doesn’t really work for the seller either. He works for the commission, which he wants to be as big as possible.

Remember, too, that there’s no Multiple Listing Service in much of the world. This is one of the biggest surprises for North Americans, who are accustomed to walking into a real estate agent’s office, detailing the specs for what they seek (two bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, US$200,000, in a nice school district, for example), then sitting back to watch as the agent types those details into his system to generate a series of listing sheets for every property currently available to suit.

How do you navigate a non-MLS market? To get any real idea what’s available for sale in any particular city or area, you’ve got to meet with as many real estate agents operating in that area as possible. Agents in these markets don’t share listings, and they share commissions. Property listings are proprietary.

That is not to say, however, that a property for sale might not be listed with more than one agent at the same time. But this is not because the agents are sharing listings. It’s because the seller has listed the property separately, with more than one agent, sometimes at differing prices.

How’s the poor, unsuspecting buyer to prevail?

I say again, engage your own independent legal counsel.

And don’t leave your common sense at the border. Do more due diligence before making a real estate purchase in a foreign country than you would back home… not less.

Sincerely,
Kathleen Peddicord
Kathleen Peddicord
Founding Publisher, Overseas Opportunity Letter

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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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