Tuesday, December 12, 2006

New Opportunities for Real Estate Abroad

More and more I am seeing different real estate organizations expand their reach into Mexico. Even with local house values declining, the expatriate market seems to still be going strong, and for the real estate entrepreneur, a great opportunity has presented itself. For those that have the access to the resources and technology, servicing the niche of people that want to own beach front property in Mexico and other countries can be very lucrative.

The reason for this post and realization (I was slow to realize, but I see it now) is that over the past few years there has been a significant trend of US citizens buying beach front in Mexico. Articles in San Diego started popping up early last year about an entire colony of US citizens that purchased beach front homes in Mexico and commute every day to their jobs in San Diego. The benefit for these individuals moving to Mexico was that their beach front home cost around 15% of what a similar beach-front home would cost in San Diego. In addition, the recently announced Luxury Condominium Complex funded by Trump’s organization is adding to the movement with people buying the high-end units as second or primary residences.

So for the average agent, where’s the opportunity? If you are net-savvy and can understand Spanish or have close ties to someone who does, you could conceivably start coordinating with Mexican real estate professionals (Century 21 already has a small presence in Mexico) and start offering services to help those that are looking for a vacation home to secure property abroad.

For an entrepreneur that sees the larger opportunity, a great resource that I would certainly use would be a listing aggregator that posted the properties for sale in Mexico and posted locations on a Trulia-like map. This site would be a great resource, especially if it also provided white papers and guidance on how to structure the corporations and trusts that are required for international ownership in Mexico.

Hmmmm….. Anybody want to help me create this site?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have been looking into this for a few months now. I studied by the ocean in Spain, and Spanish is my first language. Both have been a big influence with my intrigue into Mexican real estate. I just don't kow how to get my foot in the door...