Tapping the Global Real Estate Market

Can I tell you a secret? Finding international buyers to work with isn’t nearly as complicated as some would make it sound. There may be different laws governing their purchases and there may be cultural differences to overcome but at the end of the day it’s just a real estate transaction. And finding these clients is just a matter of prospecting.

Go Where the Buyers Are

If you attended the above panel at Inman’s Real Estate Connect SF conference this past Thursday (I’m the second one from the left), you have my apologies for the 45 minutes of your life that could have been saved had the above paragraph been written ahead of time. Then again, attendance did have the benefit of hearing how complicated the concept of attracting international buyers can sound.

Admittedly, experience here in Arizona is limited to Western Canada. Buyers from Europe tend to stop at the East Coast, buyers from Eastern Canada do the same and buyers from the Far East rarely venture past the Pacific coast. For us here in Arizona it may sound like a limited market opportunity but check a map – the provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Albert and Manitoba aren’t exactly Rhode Island.

Two Basic Questions

Several months ago I walked into my local escrow office to find agents commiserating with the branch manager. “Maybe we ought to find some Canadian buyers,” they said. I smiled and nodded, knowing that I already was working with a dozen. The difference? Certainly not brilliance on my part, as anyone who saw me this past week can attest. Rather it’s a recognition of the two basic questions for those who want to work with foreign clients (and for other buyers’ groups as well):

1) How are you going to find these buyers?

2) What are you going to do with them once you have them?

Let’s take the second part first. It doesn’t take a special degree to know some of the challenges involved for international buyers wishing to purchase property here in the States, but it does take some time to learn the bare basics. Tax questions? I’ll help you find an accountant. Legal? Here’s an attorney.

But the basics – why you can’t work on your investment property if it’s being used as a rental, why it might be worth financing the purchase in Canada rather than the United States, what someone from Alberta means when they’re looking for a bungalow – these all can be learned fairly quickly. If you don’t know the answers and are unwilling to find them, find another niche. You owe it to these buyers.

For the first part, there are many, many expensive ways to try and attract buyers. You can fly to Canada and put together buyers seminars. You can run ads in the local newspapers. Or you simply can focus some of your online efforts toward attracting Canadian buyers.

The key, like anything else online, is to have something of value to say. An international buyer is no more interested in hearing that you’re the greatest agent in the world than a domestic buyer. But tell them a bit about your area (and not generally, but the aspects of your area that might interest them), tell them about other transactions involving foreign nationals that you’ve completed and you’re in business.

Not a Quick Fix

Now here’s the potentially bad part … like any other type of prospecting, trying to attract foreign buyers is going to take some time. If you’re expecting to write a blog post and be inundated with e-mails from the get-go, you’re going to be rather disappointed. Some of us have been doing this for some time and have beaten you to the punch. But that doesn’t mean the effort’s in vain. Not whatsoever.

Not everyone who tries to prospect for international buyers will succeed. Most who fail will do so through a lack of patience, a lack of understanding of the complex decision-making process involved with a purchase on the other side of a country’s border.

“How do you keep them from wasting your time,” one person asked during the panel. Easy, I said. Let them look online and answer their questions until they’re ready, help them narrow down their varios options to the properties that best suit their needs, then write the contract.

It’s not rocket science. It’s simply customer service with an international flair.

Finding your place in the international market isn’t necessary to survive these days. But it sure doesn’t hurt.