Real Estate

What happens before a purchase

Buying property in another country is mostly not a property problem. It is an ownership, currency and succession problem that happens to end with a building. We work through those first, which is why real estate sits last in our order of work rather than first.

The sequence we follow

• Ownership — whose name, or which structure, holds the title, and how that interacts with the succession rules where the buyer lives
• Title verification — confirming what is actually being sold, by whom, and free of what. In several of our markets this is the whole job
• Currency — the currency the asset is priced in, the currency the income arrives in, and the currency the buyer actually spends
• Residency — where a market attaches a residency route to property, confirming the current threshold and how it is assessed, because these move
• Exit — how the asset is sold, to whom, and what that market’s resale depth realistically is

How we buy

We buy direct from developers we hold channel agreements with rather than off a listings portal. That gives access to release pricing and unit selection ahead of general availability, and a counterparty we deal with directly when something goes wrong.

It also means the developer pays us on a completed purchase. We will tell you what that arrangement is on any property we show you. You should assume any agent showing you a new-build development is paid by the seller; the difference is whether they say so.

Yield, honestly

Advertised yields are almost always gross and frequently guaranteed for a fixed period out of an inflated purchase price. Service charges, maintenance, agency fees and void periods sit between a gross figure and what actually reaches you, and the gap is usually wider than buyers expect. Where we quote a yield we will say whether it is gross or net and what has been deducted.

Where we transact

Dubai, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Kenya, Malaysia, Thailand and Switzerland. Each has a live pipeline and someone here who has done the paperwork. Each one also does one or two things well and other things poorly — tell us what you want the money to do and we will tell you which, if any, is the right vehicle. Sometimes the answer is that property is the wrong instrument entirely.