Do You Really Need A Buyers Agent To Secure A Great Investment
Host: Good cop on this one Paul, of do you have to agree?
Paul: To a degree, I 100 percent have to agree. I think if you’re concerned about buying anything interstate in Australia then good luck buying overseas without necessarily the proper due diligence. One thing I would say with regard is that there is actually a small handful, from what I know personally of Buyers Agents who do specialize in buying and well located well sourced and well negotiated properties overseas within the Australian complex you do fly to those markets but there are very select few. They charge a premium for it and rightly so. But if you weren’t going down that avenue and you were going to pick someone taking out of the yellow pages in a US resident or something to that effect I’d be much prepared, probably better off to go down to the casino and put it on black because I just think you’re probably taking as big a risk as a 50/50 approach in my opinion.
Host: What about places where properties seem really cheap like Thailand or Bali or something and so you think that you can’t go wrong.
Paul: And straight away I think you with the probably the potentially the not understanding of even what the freehold vs. a 99 year lease and all the other misconceptions of what actually buying property a lot of foreign countries actually means and right away there are a lot of the Asian countries in particular have less options rather than freehold and when you buy freehold; Fiji is a great example where you can actually get freehold properties which technically usually about three to five times a 99 year lease hold or a 19 year leasehold. So there’s so many different nuances that we just aren’t conditioned to in this country unless you know those particulars going overseas before you know those things as I outlined. I think there’s so many dangers which I personally wouldn’t want to touch.