Easy Money Investing

When shopping for real estate across borders or across continents, how would you like to tap into the local news and gossip, have a virtual tour of the area and chat with potential neighbors before buying a ticket for a personal visit?

Just as Web listings transformed international real estate a decade ago, new Internet tools are making even more information available and not just from real estate agents.

Increasing numbers of potential buyers and investors are exchanging information in online forums, downloading video and audio reports, tailoring Internet maps to their needs and reading blogs for news and opinion.

And what is in cyberspace today is only the beginning, says Mark Lesswing, chief technology officer and senior vice president of the Chicago- based National Association of Realtors, which recently entered its first international joint venture with its Mexican counterpart.

“What we’re going to see goes beyond listings,” he said. “We’ll see blogs take off, maps take off, research-driven things like trends in the market, more tools on social networks.”

Chatty online forums like those at Internationalliving.com, Yahoo and Google already have had effects on international real estate, but the blogging “gold rush” is just beginning, Joel Burslem, who blogs about the future of real estate marketing from Portland, Oregon, believes.

In the United States, blogs like Curbed.com, started by an under-30 New York journalist chronicling his own neighborhood, started attracting attention just three years ago, Now, real-estate-blogs.com provides a directory of dozens of blogs related to the real estate industry in the United States and Canada, and encourages visitors to vote for their favorites.

Web activity by international real estate professionals and laymen started picking up only last year. Sam Taliaferro, an American developer in Panama, now spends three hours a day on a half-dozen blogs that range from events in his highlands development to general investment trends and life in the country.

“I am reading anyway, and it only takes a few minutes to add commentary and post,” he said.

Links to his blogs can be found at Primapassport.com, a marketing organization that he founded in 2005 to encourage North American and European investment in Panama. Housed in one of the new towers in Panama City, Primapassport also publishes a glossy magazine, produces video commercials, conducts surveys and offers travel incentives, all available through the Web site.

Taliaferro is working with the National Association of Realtors in North America and with Overseas Property Professionals in Europe to expand his marketing and blogging activities throughout Central America and Mexico in the coming year.

Kunle Campbell started blogging from Oxford, England, almost two years ago while researching his master’s thesis at Warwick University.

Campbell’s study carrying out an e-marketing strategy for Property Frontiers, an international real estate consultancy led him to set up an international property blog, www.overseaspropertymall.com, a kind of “news diary,” to help himself understand market dynamics.

After graduation from Oxford, he began a more specialized blog bulgarianproperptyblog.blogspot.com because he had been bitten by the real estate bug.

“I was priced out of the U.K. and looking for a Bulgarian ski apartment as a first step on the property ladder, and also as an investment vehicle to jump-start my entry into the U.K. property market,” said Campbell, 26, who was born in Nigeria.

He found a place, but then decided it was not a good investment. Now he is looking for a French leaseback or an apartment in Berlin, but he remains bullish on Bulgarian real estate.

His blogs only recently started earning money, what he describes as “a pittance” from Google advertising, but he is redesigning them this month to make room for banner advertising. He also plans to include commentary from a real estate researcher.

Podcasting, a format that has skyrocketed in the past couple of years thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iPod, also are proving popular for information related to real estate.

“Podcasts are a huge medium at the moment for many media consumers who like to digest their information in other ways than reading,” said Felicity Quigley, property editor at Buy Association, www.buyassociation.co.uk/ property. The site was started in September as “an impartial buying guide,” featuring fact sheets, articles and surveys as well as podcasts.

“A podcast, being audio, is quite personal. You can do other things on our site whilst listening or take it away to listen at your convenience,” said Quigley, an Australian journalist who ventured into international real estate herself six years ago, buying and reselling a Florida condo to pay for her wedding.

THE Federal Government has urged the states to cut stamp duties on conveyancing and to release new land for development to make housing more affordable.

Commenting on a report released yesterday that showed housing affordability had fallen to a 22-year low, acting Treasurer Peter Dutton said that in 2005/06 the states collected $10.8 billion in stamp duties.

“This is more than double the amount they collected in 2000/01 and comes despite record amounts of GST going to the states and territories,'’ Mr Dutton said.

“Property taxes, such as stamp duty and land tax, now make up, on average, 32.5 per cent of the total revenue raised by the states from their own imposed taxes.

“This is up from 22.6 per cent in 2000/01.'’

He said that in Western Australia the situation was even worse, with property taxes making up 43 per cent of total state sourced revenue, despite record levels of GST from a booming economy fuelled by the resources sector.

Stamp duties on a median priced property in Perth add, on average, $20,500 to the cost of the purchase, he said.

The survey released yesterday by Australia’s peak building body, the Housing Industry Association (HIA), showed that for the first time Perth housing for first-home buyers is now less affordable than Sydney.

“With Perth now overtaking Sydney as the most expensive market for first home buyers it is time for the Western Australian Government to cut this excessive level of stamp duty and give back to the people who are helping to make Western Australia such a prosperous state,'’ Mr Dutton said.

“I call on all the state Labor governments to cut stamp duty on conveyancing now and make housing a whole lot more affordable for first home buyers.'’

PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico: For its first large-scale residential and hotel development in Mexico, the Spanish conglomerate Obrascуn Huarte Lain is building a sprawling complex around a series of man-made canals and lagoons along the Caribbean coast south of Cancъn.

Small boats ferry residents and guests around Mayakoba, a 40-hectare, or almost 100- acre, project, the first phase of which opened last year. The site is planned to eventually include six luxury hotels and dozens of private villas for a total cost of $1.5 billion.

“There is no place to do this kind of development in Spain,” said Juan Aguilar, director of Mayakoba. So Mexico has become the hot new territory for Spanish developers.

In addition to OHL, companies like Fadesa, Grupo Mall and Grupo Lar have moved aggressively into the Mexican market, many for the first time.

As a result, Spain is now the leading investor in a tourist-related hotel and housing development in Mexico, according to Fonatur, a government agency dedicated to developing the country’s tourism sites.

“The Spanish developers coming in are well-capitalized, and they understand how to get things done in the Latin culture,” said Jim Reilly, an investor and developer active in Mexico.

Eighteen months ago Reilly bought a 76- square-meter, or 817-square-foot, beachfront unit in the preconstruction phase of Mayakoba for $665,000. He recently sold the unfinished unit for $1.1 million.

“We’ve been seeing steady appreciation across the board of at least 15 to 30 percent a year,” he said.

Even the recent turmoil in Mexico

including drug-related violence, political unrest in the south and a bitterly disputed presidential election has done little to curb the enthusiasm of developers and buyers for Mexican property.

“From an economic standpoint it is quite stable,” said Josй Larroque, coordinator of the Mexico and Latin America real estate group for Baker & McKenzie, a Chicago-based international law firm. “You don’t have the ups and down that you used to have with currency devaluations.”

Several factors have made developers and buyers more comfortable with doing business in Mexico, including the wide availability of title insurance, the accessibility of financing and new transparency in the development process.

“We now know that Mexico has this kind of security,” said Miguel Rico, director of sales for Xcalacoco Beach Resort, a 265-unit development on the Caribbean coast near Mayakoba.

Xcalacoco, which is designed around an ecological park, is the first project outside Spain for the TM Real Estate Group.

The resort, which is right on the beach, will offer condominiums and villas ranging from $400,000 to $800,000.

TM, which also is developing a project near Cabo San Lucas, is targeting American and Canadian buyers, who are gobbling up property in Mexico.

Foreigners, mainly North Americans, are buying 10,000 homes a year in Mexico and that number is expected to double in the next five years, according to government statistics.

“There is tremendous demand for housing in general in Mexico,” said Luis Pereda, chief executive of Grupo Lar, which moved into Mexico two years ago and is primarily targeting Mexican buyers.

Mexico was the company’s second foreign market Portugal was the first but it now represents the company’s biggest foreign investment. With 15 developments planned in five states, the company expects to pump about $390 million into Mexico in the next three years.

The company is focusing on new construction, like a 294-house development in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, but Pereda expects to eventually move more aggressively into the second-home market.

“The demand is very high” for second homes, Pereda said. “Not only Mexican and U.S. buyers, but we are seeing increased interest among Europeans to buy.”

Pereda said the company had kept its eye been on Mexico because the rate of housing construction in Spain in recent years was “unsustainable.”

Many real estate analysts echo his remarks, saying that housing in Spain was seriously overvalued, particularly along its coastlines.

Aided by the strength of the euro, which is valued at around 14.25 pesos, or $1.30, land prices in Mexico are a fraction of those in Spain, builders say. And while oceanfront land is scarce in Europe, it still is possible to find large tracts available in coastal areas like Baja California and along the Pacific.

Grupo Mall is developing 400 hectares on the little-traveled west coast of the Yucatan, about an hour’s drive from the city of Campeche.

The Campeche Playa Golf, Marina and Spa Resort eventually will include 3,000 units, with condos priced at between $250,000 and $1 million.