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Home Real Estate

Global Property: A Lifestyle $$ Strategy

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Jun 17, 2012
in Real Estate
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Global Property Investment Portfolio
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Accidental Global Property Profits

I didn’t set out to become an overseas property investor. It happened by accident and organically.

In 1998, I was moving, with my then brand-new husband Lief Simon, my 8-year-old daughter, and my business, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland. Arriving in Ireland, we needed a place to live. We could have rented (and we did, at first, for about a year), but I wanted a place of our own and, more than that, I was drawn to the idea of owning an Irish Georgian-style country house made of stone. My new husband didn’t object, and, so, we set out to find one the way any couple of Americans would set out to buy a house. We dropped by a real estate agent’s office in the center of Waterford City.

We sat down with Mr. O’Shea and gave him the rundown on the kind of house we were looking for. Georgian. Stone. At least three bedrooms and three baths. With a bit of land for a garden. Mr. O’Shea seemed to take our criteria under advisement and suggested a time later in the week when one of his agents could take us out to view available properties. That first day out, we saw not one house that matched the description we’d given to Mr. O’Shea in his office. Instead, his agent took us to see four new-built “bungalows” in “estates,” as the Irish refer to suburban housing subdivisions, just outside the city. I refused to get out of the car to walk through the fourth place. It looked just like the three we’d already seen and that I’d already explained weren’t at all what we were interested in.

This was our introduction to shopping for property in a real estate market without a Multiple Listing Service. No MLS means that agents can’t show you everything available that fits your parameters, because they don’t have access to everything available. They have access only to their proprietary listings. If they don’t have what you ask for, they show you something else. Anything else. Whatever they have.

Thanks to our ignorance of how foreign property markets operate, it took us seven months to find the house that we eventually bought in Waterford. By the time we’d identified the 200-year-old stone country house that we agreed we wanted to buy, the Celtic Tiger market had meantime continued appreciating before our eyes. We considered reconsidering the purchase altogether. Could it possibly make sense to buy into what surely must have been a market top? On the other hand, we were in Ireland for several years at least, and I wanted a place to make our own. So we proceeded to buy.

That purchase was the start of a now nearly 15-year-long career investing in property overseas and, despite our initial misgivings, became our first success story. We resold Lahardan House six years later for more than twice what we’d invested in the property, including the purchase costs, the renovation, and the furnishings, and took our leave of the Celtic Tiger market just before it did, finally, peak and then turn. Today, Ireland’s property market is in ruins. Meantime, we walked away with euro profits that we invested in an asset we continue to hold today, an apartment in Paris, that is, again, worth more than twice what we have invested in it and that, for the past four years, has generated an annual yield from rental income of 5%.

Our first experience, in Ireland, frankly, was more luck than genius, but it taught us many of the fundamental lessons we value most today.

In fact, though, while Lief and I began our overseas real estate investing careers unassumingly together in Waterford, Lief had made his first property investment before I knew him, in the States. A few years before we met, Lief had taken a US$5,000 gift and turned it into US$150,000 profit through a real estate deal in Ravenswood. Ravenswood is a north-side Chicago neighborhood of middle-class office workers and first-generation Latino immigrants, a very up-and-coming working-class kind of place at the time. Here, after months of searching and negotiating to put together a deal that allowed him to make the buy with but US$5,000 cash, Lief had invested in a building configured as three two-bedroom flats. He lived in one of the apartments and rented out the other two. The rents generated a good income from the start and for more than two years to follow. After that time (just 24 months later), Lief sold the property and walked away with $150,000 after expenses. Not a bad return on US$5,000. It was that US$150,000 that made it possible for us to purchase Lahardan House in Ireland. And it was the profits from Lahardan House that later made possible our purchase in Paris…and so on.

Lief is a bona-fide start-from-next-to-nothing overseas property investor success story. And he’s not the only one I know, not the only guy (or gal) I know who has made a lot of money while having a lot of fun investing in real estate across the globe.

Here’s the point: In the current global financial climate, overseas real estate is both the smartest and the sexiest way to invest your money. It’s a key strategy for diversification at a time when diversification is not a sound investment approach but critical to survival. The very good news is that you can get started investing in real estate overseas with even a very modest capital budget. Lief began his career with US$5,000. The objective is much more than making money. Yes, you can make money this way, over time, perhaps a great deal of money. But you’ll be accomplishing far more than racking up profits. At a time when it can seem like the world is spinning out of control, you’ll be putting yourself firmly in the driver’s seat of your and your family’s financial future. You’ll be positioned for profits in the immediate term (in the form of rental yields), in the mid-term (in the form of capital appreciation), and over the very long haul, building a legacy of wealth that can be enjoyed not only by you but also by your heirs.

And, all the while, purchase by purchase, you’ll be reinventing your life.

Kathleen Peddicord

Tags: 'Global Property Investing''Property In Ireland'Lief SimonRental Property In Paris
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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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