Our Secret To Successful Global Real Estate Buys

Resident global real estate investing expert Lief Simon—also, coincidentally, my husband—and I have been shopping the globe for real estate together for more than two-and-a-half decades now.

As with everything in marriage, it took us a while to work out a system.

Lief buys by the numbers. He researches market comps (sometimes no easy thing). He figures what we should spend per square meter of construction or of land.

He projects at what rate the market is appreciating and for how long this growth might reasonably be expected to continue. He has a clear investing objective for every purchase and an exit strategy in mind before he makes an offer.

I’m all for making money off our international real estate purchases, of course, but annual yield and long-term ROI aren’t typically the tipping points for me when it comes to choosing one piece of real estate over another.

When we arrived in Waterford, Ireland, some 27 years ago as newlyweds, we were eager to launch our new life on the Auld Sod, and I had a clear picture of what that life was to look like. I wanted a big, old, Georgian-style stone house with land around it for chickens, maybe a couple of horses, and a garden. I never articulated this vision to Lief, for I assumed he shared it.

How little I understood my new husband.

Lief’s vision for our first joint property purchase overseas had more to do with diversifying outside the U.S. dollar and into the punt (this was Ireland pre-euro) and buying into one of the fastest-appreciating real estate markets on the planet at the time than it did with a love of classic Irish Georgian architecture.

The house we eventually purchased, Lahardan House, met all my criteria and delighted Lief, because, thanks to the property’s sorry state of repair, the price was under-market. I got a renovation project; Lief got a great deal.

Seven years later, as we planned our move from Waterford to Paris, we wondered what to do with our Irish country home. Sell it? Or continue to hold and rent while we were away? Lief made the call. Time to get out, he determined. He perceived, rightly, that this frothy market was nearing its top.

We sold Lahardan House for three-and-a-half times what we had invested in it. I’d made the purchase and carried out the improvements. Lief timed the sale. He sold just before the Irish property market began its slide into collapse.

Likewise, in Paris, I selected the 300-year-old apartment in the historic center of the city that I wanted to buy. Lief was happy to go along with the purchase, because, as with Lahardan House, the state of the property meant the price was nicely below market. Again, I carried out the renovations, the finishing, and the furnishing, and then, fast-forward a few years, as we prepared for our move to Panama City, again, we faced the question of what to do with the place.

Hold, Lief determined in this case. An historic city-center apartment in this market will retain its value. We should have no problem, he figured, renting it out for a reasonable yield while we were elsewhere. The yield materialized according to Lief’s projections over the decade that we rented this Paris pad, and now, today, the hard asset remains ours.

Indeed, when we’re in the City of Light this apartment is our home.

It, like Lahardan House, is also a great example of the secret we’ve employed to make our most successful global real estate buys.

No, we haven’t employed this strategy for every purchase. Sometimes Lief has bought purely for investment in places where I have no interest in spending time, and at least once I’ve bought a family holiday home that never would have held up under Lief’s spreadsheet scrutiny. These purchases weren’t necessarily mistakes, but they’ve proven the least successful from an investment point of view.