Emerging Market Real Estate Investing - Part 3

In our first two articles on emerging market real estate investing we focused on the buying and holding parts of the transaction. Here we are going to look at selling our emerging market real estate investment. This is absolutely just as important as the buying and holding. You need to know when to sell, just like you needed to know when to buy.

If you sell too late the market will have already shifted on you from a seller’s market back to a buyer’s market. When this happens home values start to decline. As a seller this is not when we want to sell. We either have to put in a big price drop right away to find a buyer or we end up chasing the market down and holding for a long time with continuous smaller price drops. This results in lost profits and is not how we want to do emerging market real estate investing. The proper way to do it is with real estate timing, just like how we bought. The same market analysis that told us when to buy can also tell us when to sell. We can see this in the real estate timing charts at REMarketStats.

The best time to sell our emerging market real estate investment is BEFORE the market shifts. In fact we want to sell before the market even reaches it’s peak. If you try to milk every last bit of appreciation out of the property you are walking very close to that line of getting caught in a declining market, because the peak and the start of the decline are really very close together. Instead, if we use our real estate analysis and sell when the real estate timing charts tell us to sell we’ll be getting out after having captured a very large chunk of appreciation but not at the top of the market. This is a great way to make money and get out while there is still a buying frenzy going on.

When it comes time to sell, we do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. We are selling when everyone else is buying. It makes life a whole lot easier when you are trying to find a buyer for your emerging market investment. You have very little competition, in fact the buyers may be competing against each other to buy your property. That makes selling so much easier. When we sell we want to get the best value for our real estate investment. That means no deferred maintenance during the hold period. Make sure the home has some curb appeal. It also means you’ll want to use a real estate professional to help you sell. If you bought in an emerging market then it probably wasn’t in your own backyard, it was in a market that was actually going to make you some money. That means you won’t be trying to sell the house on your own, after all you can’t do showings in another city. Besides, it’s much easier this way. Let the professional do their job, that way you don’t have to put in all of the time and effort yourself of trying to get the home sold. Our goal is to make money with our emerging market real estate investment, not have a lot of time consuming headaches just to save a few bucks. If you bought with the proper real estate timing you will have easily made enough money on the property to avoid having to deal with all of those headaches yourself.