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Chairmans Address

The Golden Rules for Overseas Property Investment

As Chairman of this company I firmly believe that the investment criteria are remarkably similar for the evaluation of a domestic property as an overseas property, even though buyers frequently leave their common sense and savvy in airport baggage.

Investors are advised to weigh up the following Golden rules:

1. Location, location, location
2. Exit strategies (how you will sell in the future)
3. Access (Good international travel infrastructure)
4. Finance (Funding and Tax considerations)
5. Economy & Political environment

Investors ignoring any one of the Golden rules do so at their peril!

Cheap is not always best

The most common mistake that investors make when considering finance is to look for the "cheapest" property out there. This is not a true financial analysis approach and can land the investor in hot water as they soon find empirical evidence of the old adage "if you pay peanuts, you get a monkey" and they find out that their great bargain was cheap for a reason.

I can still recall a classic example of the perils of focussing on cheap property. Our company was asked to help design the itinerary for Channel 4's "A Place in the Sun" (episode 30 2004) for the South West of Turkey, the region where my wife and business partner Jale Gultekin hails from. In researching the material for the show I encountered an agent previously featured on the show who was inundated with calls for 3 months after a property was featured by the host by the lake/river at a remarkably low price. The agent refused to sell it as he knew the reason for the low price - "the property was flooded for 1 month every year."