Have you ever dreamed of buying a house—for cheap—in a foreign country and moving there to live the expat life? Or buying an investment property and renting it out? Or getting a fixer-upper and flipping it for big bucks down the road? This could be your moment. While the coronavirus pandemic has been devastating, it has also had a silver lining by creating real estate bargains around the globe at a time of unprecedented low interest rates. “Nothing like the coronavirus crisis has come along before,” says Ronan McMahon of Real Estate Trend Alert, a publication from InternationalLiving.com, a site that tracks the best places in the world to live, retire, travel and invest.
Real Estate Trend Alert recently released a report on the five best places to find bargains around the globe. According to McMahon, the idea is to take strong US dollars or borrow money at historically low rates, and put it all to work in overseas markets by buying undervalued assets and locking in the potential for income and appreciation. “Many people feel powerless in the face of this chaos, but my feeling is that if you play this crisis right, it can prove to be quite lucrative over the long term,” says McMahon.
Add to this a work revolution—with companies pioneering remote employment—and you have the recipe for expat success.“The world is not going back to how it used to be,” says McMahon. “This is either scary or exhilarating—either way it’s happening. And for opportunity-focused folks, it’s a gift.”
When looking for real estate, McMahon says it’s important to focus on three different kinds of places. “That means looking to internationalized markets, like Mexico’s Riviera Maya. Or to places where the middle class is exploding, like Colombia. Or to downward-trending spots like parts of Europe where the population is older and innovation is limited, but where offerings have historic appeal, like Italy, for instance,” says McMahon.
