“Don’t wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and wait.”

— Will Rogers

Owning land or property outside your own country has always been an idea that intrigues me. Questions like: what do I need to do to own property overseas? Who do I need to talk to? Should I get in contact with a broker in my country? Or the country where I want to purchase the property? Or both?

Nonetheless, having a piece of land far away from where you grew up is still a very attractive concept for a lot of people, me included.

The reasons may vary, may it be for investment, a home vacation or actually living there, but undeniably, a huge wave of population are leaving their country for another one.

Case in point: 100,000 Chinese expats move to Manila.

Sadly, with the ever increasing demand for real estate space be it residential, commercial or industrial, there are no direct ways of acquiring property outside your country, currently. You need to deal with a handful of people, pay expensive fees or even worse, be told that you’re funding method cannot be accepted.

The old, sluggish processes are still plaguing our real estate industry world wide.

Luckily, with the advent of new technology, many start-ups are now paving the way to make it easier and more seamless to buy and sell properties abroad. Helping all parties involved in a real estate transaction, making it more cost efficient in the process.

AQWIRE User Profiles: EXPATS

The team has been tirelessly building the AQWIRE platform and are making great progress with it. With the addition of new tech team members, advisers and polishing of our crowdsale dashboard, the project is moving towards its goal of a global property marketplace.

You can watch some of the updates here:

Click here for the video.

Moreover, outside of our tech initiatives, a lot are also happening, one of which is trying to understand one of our potential buyers more: Expats.

While we’re trying to grow Qwikwire’s business, we realized that the problem of owning real estate abroad goes far beyond just not having a direct means to pay for it. The problem lies even from the start of the buying process for the potential unit owner and trying to market the units for the property developers.

These issues lead us to start dabbing with the idea of using the Blockchain, thus AQWIRE was born.

But if you really think about it, what are these issues?

Let’s try to enumerate some:

Lack of payment flexibility

Most real estate developers, especially those on emerging markets such as the Philippines, have a certain way of doing business. Unfortunately, part of these ways are their rigid acceptance of certain funding methods that are either out of date or inconvenient to the buyers.

In some cases, potential unit owners are asked to open up bank accounts in the country where they want to buy the unit from, for the purpose of issuing dozens and dozens of post dated checks. But it doesn’t end there, if you don’t have the full amount to deposited initially, you’ll have to find a way to fund that account from another country and that usually entails high bank wiring fees as well as steep foreign exchange spreads which ends up costing you more.

Translation

If you’re buying real estate in a foreign country, most often than not, the legal documents are not in English. This then gives you another task of finding somebody to translate it for you, again, which ends up costing you more and adding to the overall time spent.

Legal Representative

Well, this really can’t be helped and is advised to everybody who plans on buying property abroad: you need to hire a lawyer to legally represent your best interest while you’re not in the country. However, not knowing who to hire or even what to look for adds up to the problem even more.

Lack of a global platform

Majority of the platforms used to buy and sell properties, whether listing sites, CRMs, sales tools, etc., work on a highly localized level. When you start looking for properties outside the locale, the services either stops or shows you incorrect details.

As soon as we’ve realized that those problems are endemic in our real estate market today, regardless of country or region, we immediately knew that the room for improvement is also vast and that real world solutions using new tech are more than just a plan.

With AQWIRE, many of these issues will be solved. A one-stop-shop for all things real estate, for every party involved, it will greatly reduce the friction of trying to own your piece land abroad.

Furthermore, it connects far away developers to the rest of the world, exponentially increasing their potential customer reach in the process. As well as with the use of the Blockchain, many security concerns are also solved.

Check out part 2 of this 3 part blog!