How home purchases work when the owner lives overseas…

We often have assignments for overseas-based Australians looking to buy their home before they return.

The task is never simple and it requires a lot of mutual understanding and trust.

Finding a future home requires more than just market knowledge and investment-grade criteria. Our home searches hinge around our ability to quickly discern what our client is hoping to buy, our preparedness to challenge them enough at the start if the criteria is not viable, and our willingness to turn over every stone once the project commences.

We carefully profile our clients at the start and offer ideas, concerns and recommendations. Once the brief has come together, the inspections follow. These days, smart phones make a significant difference and we can easily walk through the property with the movie camera rolling, convert the file to a lower clip size and send through our virtual walk-through with commentary at the click of a ‘send’ button. It’s surprising what a tiny device can offer a client on the other side of the globe. Apps such as Periscope offer easy communication and virtual inspections, and provided the agent and vendor agree to the filming, our remote clients can enjoy the uploads without the threat of wide angle lens pictures threatening their perception of a property they otherwise can’t visit in person.

We often secure investment properties for clients, but home-finder briefs challenge the best of advocates.

The difference between the two assignments boils down to one thing; emotion.

Only yesterday we attempted to bid on a property for delightful repeat clients who are based overseas in Singapore currently for work. The virtual inspection went well, the property analysis stacked up and the builder’s inspection report uncovered no issues.

What went wrong though was the auction; and being slam bid by another buyer was disheartening for our clients who heard it all unfolding on a family member’s phone. The property eventually sold for $1.501M, some $300,000 above reserve.

6 Longstaff St Carnegie

Managing the communication, understanding sensitivities, and breaking bad news is all part of the process.

But with patience and hard work comes reward. Eventually (and sometimes rather quickly), a successful brief comes to a head.

Just last month we had the pleasure of working with a young duo based in Russia for work. Their dream was to return to Melbourne and move into a welcoming home in the inner-west. The challenge for us was to come up with a plan for a home which could double as a good quality, low-maintenance investment in the meantime.

With a budget of $800K and a three bedroom requirement, we set about the task by nominating a townhouse purchase in Newport as a viable option. A series of phone hookups followed and within weeks we were on the trail.

The hardest thing about finding 32 Monmouth St was the timing. I pounced on it the very day it came online. Our clients had been with us for seven days only – and we felt that although everything about this house was perfect, their sense of what was ‘relative’ was not developed yet. Typically an auction loss, more than ten identified potential home, and perhaps a few false starts would give an overseas client enough exposure to the market conditions and available options for them to make a sound choice. For our less-experienced expats however, their choice was either to trust us or to let the opportunity pass in their quest to gather more experience in the market we’d chosen for them.

Simply expecting a client to trust you is naive.

Whether they were comfortable with me or not, we hadn’t been working together for long enough to have complete trust in me.

So I had to explain the risk of letting this one go. “I wish this one had come up two weeks’ later. But it’s here, now. We have an opportunity to buy it at your budget, or we can take a chance and see it run to auction, but if any other buyers decide to compete, we’ll most likely be outbid. If we do miss it, I’m concerned that it will be the one which haunts our search. You’ll compare others to this one constantly and you may find that it’s the one you wish you didn’t let go.”

They took a long weekend to give it thought and on the Monday the agent called to say another advocate had inspected it and recommended it to her clients. Fortunately for us, our clients’ preparation paid off. The other buyers were keen but required a finance clause,

Happily we secured the property swiftly and on budget, and just four days ago our clients returned home for a holiday and inspected their new home for the first time.

Smiles all round, and we couldn’t be happier for them. With special thanks to the agents involved for making the process seamless and for taking the time to explain the interim landlord process.