Real Estate Innovation

The Exchange Rate Secret To Making Money

The gloom and doom of global currency exchange rates is hardly missable, with news headlines and current rates being splashed about everywhere telling us that we’re in global crisis, that we’re experiencing a real crunch, that the dollar is weak and the Euro is running amuck. International businesses and traders have a real battle on their hands just trying to identify what the best deal, the best rate and the best conversion rate is, and at present it seems a perpetual challenge just to stay up to date with the fluctuating currencies.

Our global society now means that we no longer have to consider buying products locally, or even in our own currency. Buying online gives us the opportunity to not only shop around for the best deal, but also for the best currency. Many online traders don’t have their conversion rates from one exchange to another linked to an independent conversion tracker. In these cases, you can often find that by switching currencies, you can get a better deal. I saved fifty pounds by simply buying in the country’s local currency than by buying in my own from an online retailer - it’s not hard to save quite a significant sum.

If you’re in the property market, and in particular looking at investing overseas, this problem with sliding exchange rates becomes extremely challenging. One day the deal looks good, but within a couple of weeks you’re starting to look at the same deal and realise that, as a direct result of the exchange rate, you’ve just lost several hundred pounds, dollars or Euros, and possibly even more than this. Even investing in a fairly modest 100,000 property, a change in exchange rates between pound sterling and Euros of just a few pence can make several thousand Euros difference. If you’re quick, then this can be good news, but usually you have enough to worry about without pouring over all the bank rates and exchange rates and currency conversions.

However, every cloud has a silver lining as they say, and in this case, there are a few companies that are still able to offer consumers deals which fly in the face of such bad news. Imagine being able to find a company that can promise to lock in the exchange rate that we had three months ago? Incredibly, I have come across just such a company, and I’m sure there are others out there too. At the moment, using my favourite online currency convertor, the Euro is rated at 1.26 to the pound sterling. Yet, I have found a company offering investors the chance to buy Spanish property at a rate of 1.40 to the pound sterling! Do they even know what’s happening in the world out there? Do they care?

So what difference does this exchange rate really make? It may seem like a few pence, but let’s see how this would really affect you. Let’s imagine you’re looking at buying a nice 200,000 property over in Spain. Taking advantage of an 11% difference in rates would mean you could potentially be making a saving of over 22,000! That’s certainly not a saving to shrug off!

Normally when you are looking to invest in property overseas you will want to make sure that you research the exchange rate first of all, and once it has been identified, it is agreed by all parties and written into the contract. By doing this you safeguard yourself against any unforeseen global crisis in monetary exchange. Finding yourself a company willing to backdate the exchange rate to the early part of this year, before the crunch caused such a downturn in rates across the world is of enormous benefit, naturally, and is well worth further investigation. It’s finding companies like this that are either absurdly generous, or simply unwilling to accept the pessimism of the banks that makes the whole prospect of moving into the sun a whole lot sunnier!

Investing in property overseas shouldn’t be about gambling, but necessarily whenever purchasing property, you have to be aware that prices fluctuate, rates vary, and you could find that, whilst long term you’re bound to make a tidy profit, the short term is usually unpredictable. If you’re lucky enough to find a company like the one I have come across that’s offering an exchange rate drastically below that offered by banks or other financial institutions, then you immediately remove a large chunk of that risk - over 11% of that risk in this particular case. By saving yourself tens of thousands of Euros off the price, you could immediately sell the property on at the normal going rate of exchange and make yourself a quick 11% profit! Clearly that would be unlikely to attract many people, but what is attractive is the chance to create a safety net to help you get through the short term, and enjoy your long term investment.

For the first time investor, you may be surprised just how different buying overseas property is, and you may have set yourself an initial budget. Once you do a little further research, however, you may well discover that, as a result of varying international laws, traditions, methods and requirements, your budget is shrink wrapped a little too far, and you find the whole project becoming less feasible. By managing to save yourself at least 10,000 simply by using an inflated exchange rate like this, you’ll be able to get back on budget without lifting a finger! Well, perhaps a finger- after all, you’ll have to find the same company I discovered first!