22 June 2011
Once you have chosen where your property abroad will be it’s time to get out there for some viewings. Of course this is much more effort than when you do it in the country you live in. I’ll tell you how I was able to pick my property in a weekend by following a series of simple steps.
Step 1 is do your research. The more the better and keep the all the info you collect in a single place that you can refer back to. The good news is that you can do pretty much all of this on your PC. Make sure you’re connected and then get comfortable because it takes time.
Open a new spreadsheet, this is where you will keep all the important info you come across. You need to start by compiling a list of real estate agencies and developers that deal with your chosen area. The very least you need is websites and contact information. Next you need to find out what the terms for each of these are, summarise them and put them in the spreadsheet as well.
I found that terms vary a lot. Sometimes the buyer is charged a fee, sometimes it’s the seller and sometimes it’s split between the two. Also the kind of service varied, some agencies simply introduced you to the seller, others offered a full hand holding service to help you through the whole sale process. All of this is worth knowing because it will help you set rules for your purchase decision. Consider the scenario where you choose a property that is listed with more than one agency in which case the terms will be all that tells the two deals apart.
Now it’s a case of browsing through the agency websites and making note of potential properties. Remember when you choose an overseas property to use common sense so that you avoid the wrong kind. By the way, have you noticed that quite often agencies don’t give you the exact map location for the properties? That’s when developers sell directly to the public, agencies don’t want you to go direct because they won’t get any commission. You however do want to go direct because you’ll get a better price, so put in extra effort to find out exactly where the properties are. Here are two ways that I did it.
- I studied the floor plans and found the names of neighbouring streets, then I used google maps to pin point the exact location.
- Where I was looking the buildings all have names like Sea View. So I searched for the building name in the town I had chosen. Usually I ended up on the developer’s own website where I could find info about direct sales.
Don’t forget to put all the information you come across in your spreadsheet because you will need to refer to it regularly and print it out for when you go for viewings. All that done move on to step 2: plan your property viewing visit.
