It's excellent advice indeed.
I just wish that it was communicated to a much wider audience.
As I discussed in a
recent blog entry, I have noticed that international property buyers tend to fall into two distinct groups.
The first are very savvy and spend hours and hours researching all possible markets before they make an informed decision. The majority of visitors to this board will fall into this category.
The second group tend to just 'go with the flow' or listen to the first semi-knowledgeable person they know and rush to buy the first property in the first market that they hear about.
The mass media seems to be very much at fault for pushing markets willy-nilly. It seems as if, at least once a quarter, there's a new feature in one of the international property supplements on some market or another being 'the next big thing'. A recent example of this was
the Sunday Mirror's article from just two weeks ago entitled 'Is Turkey The New Spain?' written, as they all seem to be, as if the journalist in question was the first person ever to think of Turkey as a potential destination for investing in property!
I'm not saying that Turkey is a bad place for investment, but I can hardly think that many of us who frequent this board regularly would still consider Turkey as a 'brand new, up and coming market'.
It was as a result of reading loads of these 'Country X is the Next Big Thing' articles that made me start doing some research of my own to try and find somewhere where it would be possible to compare all of the territories that I thought could be potentially interesting side-by-side. After an afternoon of fruitless Googling, I just couldn't find anywhere online where I could see all of the information at-a-glance, and so I did it myself.
You can see the results of my labour here if you're interested.
So I agree with you fully when you say that people really need to research all of the potential markets. I think it's something that not nearly enough people do in sufficient depth, which is insane considering that the difference between investing in the 'right' market versus the 'wrong' market can be measured in tens of thousands of pounds.