Real estate developers have also adapted to the various needs of their potential buyers.

OFW’s or Overseas Filipino Workers are Filipino citizens working outside the country to earn more and secure their family’s future. This said, majority of these workers have always wanted to have a place to call their own and thus invest in real estate projects across the country. In turn, developers have opened new development projects or doubled down on existing ones that specifically cater to this demographic. More middle-income house-and-lot packages are to be developed in the recent years, especially in the areas of Central Luzon, Calabarzon, Western and Central Visayas, where 48% of OFW’s come from.

Moreover, investing on real estate rather than parking your hard earned cash in a bank has been a major trend lately.

Case in point: Hong Kong Property Investors

Attributed to the ultra high prices of residential units in Hong Kong, many property investors are looking far out the country and into the rest of the Southeast Asian region where prices are only a quarter to that of Hong Kong.

Thai property developers, for example, allocate a certain portion of their units specifically for Hong Kong investors and they’re seeing great results. On one particular development, Life Asoke — Rama — 9, 95% of the 164 units allocated for Hong Kong investors were sold in less than 2 days. With rental yields averaging at 5.15% compared to bank savings interest rates of <1% per annum.

That’s not all.

Nearly US$3.5 billion of outbound real estate investment left Japan in 2017, 70 percent more than in 2016 and two and a half times the 10 year average to 2016.

“This is a kind of early stage for Japanese investors, who are once again looking outside Japan, after the “Bubble Era” back in 1990 when we saw huge capital outflows overseas.” Takeshi Akagi, Head of Capital Markets Research, JLL Japan

Considering Japan’s largest investment institutions, even if a small portion of their funds went to real estate, it would still make significant effects.

Take GPIF (Government Pensions Investment Fund) as an example, an investment fund that has $1.48T USD of assets under management, are eyeing to invest 0.5% to alternatives (real estate included). That amounts to $7B USD of new invesments.

With such a high demand in residential real estate in Asia alone, it begs the question:

‘how easy can it be to invest on a property outside your country?’

Well, it’s not.

As we’ve enumerated on our previous 2 articles about Expats and Travelers, trying to buy a unit from another country entails a long, arduous process that involves multiple intermediaries, ballooning costs and is a financial logistics nightmare.

To recap, you need to overcome the following things:

Lack of Payments Facility

Most real estate developers in emerging markets accepts only a handful of payment options, which usually are either out of date, simply too inconvenient or lack the security measures needed to safely transfer your money from your bank to theirs.

On top of this, there are certain limitations and legal frameworks to navigate. Take Thailand as an example. You need to fill-out the FET (Foreign Exchange Transaction) certificate before you can even remit or send money to pay for your unit.

Legal Docs. Translation

If you’re buying real estate in a foreign country, chances are, their legal docs are in their native language. Finding somebody to translate it correctly adds up to your overall costs and the things you need to worry about.

Legal Representative

There’s really no way around this. We recommend having lawyers to represent your best interest in the country you’re buying the unit from.

Lack of a Global Platform

With the advent of new technology, the age of internet and digitization, you’d think that there are platforms that cater to the needs of different potential buyers worldwide. Unfortunately, there aren’t. Majority, if not all, of the real estate platforms that cater to the needs of buyers and developers are highly, if not only, localized. Thus, using them for international property purchases may prove to be detrimental.

So, How does AQWIRE help solve these?

A global property platform on the Blockchain, it brings all key players in a real estate transaction to one place, making the acquisition process a whole lot easier, smoother and more cost-effective to potential property investors.

People who wants to invest in real estate outside their country can go to the platform and browse through a surfeit of listings from different developers worldwide. Furthermore, specific details will be seen in the platform that can help with the decision making process. Data like ROI’s, traffic, crime rate, nearest establishments will be available.

Additionally, aside from having a direct way to contact sales agents and brokers from different countries, AQWIRE will also have lawyers and validators to assist you with any regulatory concerns and corroborate the data shown, so investors can be assured of the authenticity and correctness of all details concerning the desired unit as well as the developer.

The best part?

Paying for your property will be so much easier.

With Qwikwire’s banking networks, you can now pay for your various real estate fees like reservations, amortizations and monthly dues, with any of your debit or credit cards and bank accounts. You wouldn’t have to open up a foreign account, issue dozens and dozens of post dated checks, find a way to fund said account from a different country and continuously do so for the next 5, 10, 20 years.

Furthermore, future developments will also include auto-debit payment options for different funding methods. So you won’t have to worry about missing those regular, monthly payments and incurring late fees or penalties.

Since we’re also working with Blockchain, having a crypto payments gateway where you can pay for your real estate bills using different cryptocurrencies will also be available!

We are very adamant that by building AQWIRE, a lot of these redundancies and roadblocks in purchasing and selling units locally and, especially, internationally will be eliminated.

We want to give everybody buying a unit, whether Expats, Travellers and Property Investors the comfort, convenience and savings that we all deserve.