PropeNomix for Expats with Adam Lawrence

Use the miracle of compound interest to your advantage. You get one, and then it leads to two, and then it leads to three, but then it leads to five, and then it leads to eight, and then it leads to 13. And you be surprised what you can do in a five year cycle without a gigantically ambitious amount of capital behind you in the first place. And look, if you're earning a few grid and you can afford to put some more money in every six months or whatever, so much the better, all down to the miracle of compound interest. So utilize it, because there's a reason why Einstein called it the 800 of the world. You're listening to Expat Property Story, a podcast in which I share my story. To smooth the way for you to. Have your own expat Property story. Hello there. Nearly there. 89, as they say in the bingo halls. That's the episode we've reached. And the words of wisdom that introduced this week's show belong to Adam Lawrence, who has an Ma in Philosophy, politics and Economics from Oxford University and has also been involved in more than 500 property deals in the last decade. So he is perfectly placed to provide you with more pearls of wisdom around investing in UK property in these challenging economic times. So stay where you are. Adam will be back in a jiffy. Now, as we'll find out later in the show, adam is a big believer in the importance of being part of a community. And in 2017, together with fellow Brummy Sue Sims, he created Partners in Property, a network of property investors who meet up once a month with the aim of sharing knowledge, experience and contacts so as to avoid the need to spend 20,000 pounds on an expensive property training course. Partners in Property have since expanded their monthly meetups to Bristol, Manchester and London. And fortunately for Expats, they also run online meetings and virtual coffee sessions, too. Property investing can be a lonely place at times, and because not everyone gets it, it can really help to meet up with people in the same boat as you. Here in Hong Kong, we have recently started a casual meetup on the first Saturday of each month at 1130 at the Urban Bakery in the Landmark building in Central. And the first meeting was a modest success. Those who attended started a WhatsApp group as a way to keep in touch and support each other between meetings. Not long afterwards, I got an email from a listener who read our newsletter, which you can access by signing up to our mailing list at www.expatpropertystory.com. At the end of the newsletter, we invited you to write in and tell us the one thing that you're struggling with in your Expat Property story. Well, that's what someone called SS did, and she said she was having a hard time setting up a UK business bank account after moving to the US. And if you've started a limited company for property, you'll know that setting up the company is the easy part. But getting a business bank account can be a real pain as the high street banks insist on you being physically present. And some of the challenger banks such as Tide and Starling have their own complications since the apps are not available on your phone, if your App Store location is set outside of the UK, anything around apps and mobile phone technology makes me very nervous. So I was not the person to help SS in the US. So I reached out to my new Hong Kong property friends and posted her inquiry directly onto our WhatsApp Group chat. And before you could say Network Provider Services, I was able to reply to her email with some solutions and in return, SS left me this very kind review. Solid advice and trustworthy. You can't really beat that. It's a big world out there as an expat and so important to have access to community. In similar scenarios, I hit a block in my expat property journey and right on time, a news update email arrived from the expat property guy. The very last sentence said, tell me one thing you're struggling with. I replied and within a matter of hours received help and was able to move forward in my journey. Thank you so much, EP guy. You and the community are literally a much needed lifeline in this big world of expats dotted around the globe. Now, to be fair, the thanks should go to the inaugural members of our emerging Hong Kong community of expat investors. You know who you are, but as previously mentioned, if you would like to start a meetup wherever you're based in the world, I'm happy to announce it on the podcast if it'll help you out. What have you got to lose? And if you want to help out, I'd just love it if you could leave an honest review wherever you listen to your podcasts or on the podcast website www.expatpropertystory.com, or just get in touch and tell us the one thing that you're struggling with in your expat property story. Now, if you Google Adam Lawrence and podcast, you'll find lots more of Adam's wisdom around property and economics. But unless I've missed it, none specifically aimed at expats and none relating to his property song of choice. Well, it's time to put that right. There'S a time and property disc I'm going to plug for Wanted Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi because as a now longer in the tooth beleaguered portfolio landlord, that's how I think the local authorities think about me and my ilks these days. They want to take us down one way or the other, but actually they end up working with us as a kind of necessary evil, because this comes back to the death of the part time landlord, if you like. So I feel I'm slinging a six string on my back and riding the horse, dodging the bullet into the sunset. Absolutely. I'm hoping to stay alive rather than dead. Really? That's the plan. Adam, you are an expert in both property and economics and I've actually got a name for you. You are a prop economist. Well, you know what's funny, John? You wouldn't have found my YouTube channel. It's very new, but it's called Proponomics with Adam Lawrence. I Googled it Propenomix and no one had used it before and I thought, it's me all over, isn't it? But thank you. You've nailed it. I reckon I'm very happy in that space. Very, very happy. So my layman's understanding of economics and investing at the moment is that since 2008, even at the highest rate of interest, your money is actually losing value if you leave it in the bank. With that in mind, is it still a good idea for expats? 99% of them are in full time employment. Is it still a good idea to invest in property in those circumstances? I think that's a great question, because obviously everyone's asking themselves that at the moment. I know from people in my network who deal a lot with Expats that they sold a lot of properties to them over the past couple of years. But then good old Liz Trust came in and nearly bloody wrecked everything, nearly blew up the economy, and then it became very difficult. The currency was volatile again, a bit like it was after the referendum, but also soon, if labor are elected in the next election, which is looking more than 50% likely, I don't think it's a done deal. They're talking about putting up the 2% additional rate, or additional additional rate that the Expats already pay and cranking it even more. Although I'm sure there's a number of clever structures that could be used to avoid that 2% rate anyway, that would just increase the incentives to avoid that. Realistically. The question has always been for me, where do you see yourself in future? My small kids keep me in the UK, definitely. My wife's parents and my parents are still around and mobile. We're not in a hurry to go anywhere. There's a lot of things to like about it. I get that. I lived in Geneva, in Switzerland myself for a couple of years and I could see the attraction to that side of things. But ultimately there were things that pulled me back home. So I still see my net worth and things that I consider when I'm looking at my whole investment portfolio. And I think about it in pounds, and I think pounds is the relevant currency to me, sterling is the relevant currency. So I think what matters is where you're going to be resident and where is your relevant place, and it's a hard thing to do, costly. You've got to consider not only if you've got children, but then what about when they have children and how will that change how active or not are you able to be as a grandparent? You got to think about that. And by doing that work, thinking fingers very heavily crossed, 50 years into the future, it gives you a bit of a different perspective. So I think if sterling still remains a relevant currency to you, as I would see it, then I would think yes. Because the reality is, the data speaks on this stuff. Since the Housing Act 1988, there hasn't been a better investment than buy to let leveraged residential property, right? And the reality is it has utility. Crypto, NFCs, whatever, doesn't have any utility to me, just go back to the South Sea bubble, the Tulips and all the rest of it, right? Were they really that useful when they went up 1300% in price in one day or whatever? No, it was a load of nonsense and I saw crypto get big and people start selling courses on crypto and stuff like that. And I tried Tulips from the rooftops because that's what I could see happening. So vitalette. Residential vitalet is completely the other end of the spectrum because people lose sight of the fact that the returns are acceptable. To good, to really good. If you do it really well, if you actively do it and you're good at it, if you can work with the right sorts of people, if you're trying to do this from abroad, as long as you buy well. Or intelligently in the right areas. And as long as the train stays on the tracks for the next five or ten years, you're going to make money. And what you need to remember is the level of risk you take or don't take. Because people compare who aren't really sophisticated investors, they compare the returns from their investments, they base it on what happened in the last six weeks or twelve months. They have a recency bias. That's a very human trait and they engage things by what they see in front of them. Sometimes people like talking about what they do for investment because it's the sort of circle of friends they move in or they work in finance or whatever. If my houses in Stoke on trend, have beat the hell out of your apartment in Park Lane for the last nine years, you might not want me talking about it around the dinner table or whatever, but in reality, my IRR has beat yours to death. And that's why I've been able to scale what I've done and do what I do. So I think with all those caveats, of course, you can't just put your hand up and say, I work abroad, I earn 450 grand a year, I don't pay any tax on it. And I want to flower into property because you're going to get hoovered up by one of these relatively top shop operations that's going to sell you a flat at the price of a three bedroom house in the same town that you don't really know very well in the north or the East Midlands or wherever. And that's not the stuff you want to be buying and it's not the stuff that's going to make you the money, it's the stuff that's going to make the people selling it to you the money. So there's no doubt in my mind, because if sterling is one of your appropriate currencies in high inflation times, property hasn't done too badly in the past when you go back and look and it's not really about inflation beating at the moment, it's about what it's always about. What's the appropriate level of risk for you, what's the appropriate level of return that you're expecting to get? How can you minimize some of those risks? You won't take away all of them and then you're offshore earning good money. When do you get the next deposit from? That should be the thing. You're focusing on lots of friends who've gone offshore and said, I'm doing it for five years. Precisely zero of them so far have made it back at five year time horizon and some of them are on their five year cycle. The golden handcuffs, we call it usually, yeah. One thing you said they suggested a caveat if you buy well, but how do you buy well, as an expat. Would you suggest well, so put this into context just briefly. I have bought through agents, I have then bought through auctions, I have bought through sourcing agents, I have bought direct to wholesale traders. Right. Some of those things aren't necessarily accessible to everybody who's listening, but like anything, anybody you're going to work with to do help you out, however you're going to do it, you're probably going to split into one of two types of person. Number one, you want to keep as much control as possible and you're going to do it yourself, negotiating from abroad. You're going to use someone like Vuba to go and do inspections and investor reports and stuff like that for you. You're going to do all the research. But the problem is if you're not really bouncing that off anybody else and perhaps you can bounce off a community of friends wherever you're living, or just a broader expat community as you speak to. So that's the first type of person. The second type of person is going to look for someone to do all the work for them. Now, let's deal with the second type of person first, because I think it's quite easy. You must set it up well from the start. If you don't, you will suffer. So if you are going to get X or Y limited, you need to be going to the property shows, you need to be thinking differently in a very contrarian way in these situations. If I see the sharp suit and the flashy brochure, I'm not going to start the conversation. I don't want to buy from you in whatever city you think you're going to sell me anything to? Because I can see what your avatar is and I've got that avatar that's not going to impress me. What's going to impress me is the salt of the earth people who are maybe up somewhere in the north of England, who are buying yielding stuff that are doing the business. They're not shouting about it, but they're not completely under a rock somewhere and I'm going to get to know them. I'm going to get to know them in the same way that I would try and get to know any agent or anyone that I'm going to work with. I'm almost interviewing them, basically, and I'm putting quite a lot of trust in their hands. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to know who the second person is in that area. If these first guys turn me over, I've got a backup plan, right, and I might even just work with both of those people. It depends on volume and all the rest of it, of course, but I might well work with both of those people and I would let both of those people know that the other person exists because it keeps them honest, because it shows that you're a sensible business person. I had a great conversation with a bank the other month who sent one of their underwriters down to come and sit down with me and check that they weren't lending millions of pounds to a lunatic or whatever. And it went very well. And at the end of it, the lady said, well, what does it take for us to get all of your business? And I said, not possible. I would never have more than 25% of my funding with any one lender. I know that's bad news for you, but also, really it should be good news for you because it shows that I'm a Prudent manager at risk, right? So take that first setup part really seriously. But before thinking about who, you need to think about where. And that requires research. Look, I'm a data geek at the end of the day, because there's this big myth, probably to bust this myth. First of all, there's this big myth that in lower yielding areas, capital growth is higher, right? And it's just not true. This stuff needs to be measured on a percentage basis. Go back to my 25 houses in Stoke compared to one flat in Park Lane, right? My rent roll is a hell of a lot bigger, my diversity is a hell of a lot bigger because I might have one or two non payers. Let's say I've got 23 or 24 payers, so it carries it along quite happily. I can trim off 2345 off the portfolio and raise a bit of capital, but still keep the engine that's making the money. So you've got to put all of those things into context. You've got to have a plan, you've got to choose an area based on. For me, I would base it on things like population growth forecasts, because that's massively correlated to property prices rising. Real big one overall demographics in general. Absolutely. One of my mantras has always been, if things went badly for me in my life, like sometimes life throws stuff at you. Would I live there if I had to? If the answer is no, then I don't want to buy it. So I use that as a bit of a metric and I look at areas of comparison. I use property data quite expensive. I think it's a fantastic tool, not very expensive at all, and you can find lots of good data out about areas. And population growth is my number one favorite. If I found out, as you would do if you did the research, that Bristol is the number one city for growth projected over the next ten years in the UK, that doesn't necessarily mean I would buy in Bristol. Right. Because I might look at what surrounds Bristol and where I see the potential growth coming from and things like that. Adam thinks that the first type of remote investor, the one that wants to control everything, might need to be even more meticulous than the one trusting someone else to do the research, since the former is investing more time and should therefore expect a greater return. This is the person who's going to keep as much control as possible, probably extremely accomplished in what they do. They're doing this on top of a 14 hours a day job they have to do that maintain a ridiculous level of performance. That person is going to have to do the work even more well. It depends what sort of person you are. I'm quite a people person, but I've got quite good at gauging and reading people, so I can work people out relatively quickly. So that helps me a lot because I work out. Would I work with them or would I not? Right? And then there's a process that we'll go through to basically give them a chance to shaft me, to be honest. And I take it as a lesson and say, well, I'm glad I paid that for the lesson. And that serves me really well because there's a little bit of traders mentality in there. Run your winners. So if a relationship works out well people I've worked with for 15 years, both of us have done really well from those derangements people who have either put me under the bus or done something else that I didn't really like within the first six months, regardless of the money, that time been lost. And that's the scarcet resource of all. And it hurts. But I almost thanked them for showing me early on that it wasn't going to work out and just move on. So if you want to try and control everything, I think your research has got to be meticulous. I think it's got to be really strong. I think you've still got to get your ideas or your feedback or whatever it is from somewhere. You need people you can bounce stuff off against. You can't live in your own little bubble 4000 miles away and still just think you're going to even achieve the average in the market necessarily. And this isn't about achieving averages. You want to outperform the average, right? Because you're putting your time and effort into it. If you want to achieve the average go and buy real estate investment trust and let them do it for you because that's going to give you the exposure to the asset class you're looking for. You need more edge. You're also going to want your structure to be favorable because obviously one of the good things is as property appreciates in nominal terms we can refinance and that's why your initial investment can look so good when you're five plus years in. Lots of food for thought there. So a couple of things that you said made me think are the days of the part time landlord finished? Great question. I mean to be honest with you, I've been saying this in public since about 2015. I think that was what George Osborne wanted was to sound the deaf. Now his motivations for that are questionable and there have been a number of things alleged over the years around shares in various holdings which we won't get into. But I think that was the very clear message and trying to be balanced on this front. You sort of understand it from a governmental perspective. You don't want a fractured marketplace because fractured marketplaces generally don't lead to particularly good outcomes always. They lead to what the economists would call perfect competition where sometimes nearly anything can be done for money. I've seen this on the ground years ago and used to go out and still do the viewings and stuff like that. I'd see some properties and I'd be horrified about what I could only imagine was going on in there and just think how are people getting this is on the open market? People should be being arrested for some of the stuff that's clearly going on in this property but nobody seems to do anything about it. So that's a problem to say the least. How do you solve that? Well not with a monopoly but if you look at the advanced economies, housing ownership structures around the world lots of the US resi is institutionally owned, lots of German resi is institutionally owned. Pension funds and the like. They have access to capital. It's the people that the government really would rather the money to be going to those sorts of people rather than the hedge funds rather than the other private equity houses and the likes. They'd rather they were going to venture funds. But also there's a cultural acceptance of rental which the government in this country, regardless of the color of the government seems to be willing to fight tooth and nail even though a lot of the rest of the Western world has moved in that direction. And the thing is, I think there will be a wash of millennials and beyond that. Just saying, you know what, you're not telling us what to do anymore. If we want to rent, we're going to rent, because it suits us to rent. And this is one of the big problems that there is in the debate because everybody starts from the ideological, people must own homes, conservatives are addicted to it because it's what created the virgin middle class of the 1980s and beyond. And then of course, what the government do is they just tax them nearly out of existence, right? They're the poor, you know what, to pay all the tax really. So go big or go home was one of the first things I said after George Osborne's 2015 clause 24 budget, as it was at the time. So that suggests that you think that the days of the part time landlord are over. A property company can sit within your portfolio of your investments that you have, which may or may not include a home that you own somewhere in the world, which may or may not include significant investments in tax wrappers, pensions, is they're relevant to you, et, et cetera, cetera, et cetera. So I think a property company that can recycle all of its profits and there are very tax efficient in the UK system ways in which to run a property company such as doing quite a lot of refurbishment because some of that can be written off against your corporation tax, which is kind of an Amazon style approach to get big before you sort of flip the lever and then start making profits when you can't really grow anymore sort of thing. So I think that's not a bad idea at all. I think a lot of people sell BR or whatever they want to call it as a thing. And especially with the interest rates the way they are today, it's much harder to achieve because the interest coverage ratios are getting in the way apart from anything else. Although I will say over the last eight weeks or so, I've seen more deals that are viable than I have done since the 1 April 2020. There's definitely been a lot in the market that is transactable on and there's definitely people who are taking defense or waiting for the crash to happen, which I just personally am not seeing the real fundamentals for that crash. So those people will probably come back to the market in another six months when inflation has ravaged away at their capital a bit more. So I think you absolutely can use a recycling model. I think you can set something up with it being managed and all the rest of it. I think people suffer sometimes, I've seen this before, they're fighting tooth and nail to hang on to 50 grand a year income doing something. They've got 3 million pound property that's really poorly managed from an asset management perspective, that you could find that 50 grand a year in that portfolio if you took it seriously and did it properly. So I think it can be done, but you still got to do the front loaded effort if you want to do it well. But if you don't get your structure right and you don't have your long term almost life plan correctly engaged, you're just going to make mistakes or bring yourself headache that you don't want and need. But if you do get your structure right and you invest for the long term adam points out that the magic of compounding could lead to long term wealth. What do investors look for? They look to total returns, so they might come from in residential buy to let. They're going to come from some in terms of cash flow in the now, some in terms of capital growth if we bought it really well, some in terms of a discount on the way in. Perhaps difficult to achieve, especially from abroad, but potentially possible. Right. And be careful when you look at returns, because if they just piled a load of money in in 2019 and there was a pandemic and all the prices went up, well, you know what, the debt hit us all in the face if we owned any property in that period. Right. Any skill involved in that pandemic? No, of course not. Like at the end of the development, I will always look at what did the market do for me and then what value did I add? And if the answer is, well, you know what, I added my value and then the market did loads. All fantastic, probably won't happen next time, right. But great. But don't put myself on the back for all of it when only this much of it was really down to me. Have we got extra returns? Because we did our research and we invested in a good area, like an out of Bristol or wherever that might be for you, and we held it to the five or ten years that we planned to, instead of getting the UK average over the next ten years of 2.8% of the year, which, of course, I'm pulling that out of somewhere. But it's a loose, accurate figure. You got 3.7. Well, you know what? Law of compound interest shows you've outperformed gigantically on the lifespan of that investment. Use the miracle of compound interest to your advantage. That's what the whole game is about. You don't want to be and I'm sure the vast majority Honestness John won't be thinking, I must invest in property so I can make an extra 250 quid a month to have a vice to let or something. Let that company propagate. So you can reinvest it, because I describe it to people a bit. Like Fibonacci sequence. You get one and then it leads to two and then it leads to three, but then it leads to five and then it leads to eight and then it leads to 13. And you be surprised what you can do in a five year cycle without a gigantically ambitious amount of capital behind you in the first place. And look, if you're earning a few grid and you can afford to put some more money in every six months or whatever, so much the better. Like a pension. Start at 25 and put 100 quid a week away. You're better off doing that than at 55 putting 1000 quid a week away. You've got so much more money to start when you're 25, all down to the miracle of compound interest. So utilize it, because there's a reason why I signed called it the 8th wonder of the World. Whether you choose to find someone else to do everything for you or find all your deals yourself, in both scenarios, you're going to have to learn how to carry out due diligence on prospective property partners. How do you due diligence people? Because I get emails from expats who say, you know, I'm I'm struggling to find someone to work with in the UK and I've found this company and they're going to do this and they're going to do that. They're from the other side of the world, they're kind of maybe just starting out in property investment. How would you go about doing your due diligence bearing in mind you're on the other side of the world? Word of mouth recommendations are always the best. If you've got people in your network who've been working with someone for more than twelve months that's delivered them fair returns. But in terms of what you can do online, start a company's house, right? You need to know what you're looking at at company's house. So understand the research, what a charge is, what's a fixed charge, what's a floating charge or a debenture does this person who's going to help you out most of having a huge portfolio, right, great, go and me up a company's house. There's a few charges and then there's a few companies, right? They're all solvent, they'll file their accounts on time and they're all good. If there are any questions about my company's house, I would not want to come and ask them and I'm sure I could explain it, right? And I think anybody should be willing to answer any questions. Now if they've incorporated their company within the last 18 months, they haven't filed any accounts yet. It's got to be a bit of a red flag, folks, right? If they dissolve companies in a liquidation event, then how many red flags have we got? I'm not saying everybody who's been involved in a liquidation is a bad person to work with, but that conversation needs to be out in the open. And if it was me, I've never had a company liquidated yet quite happily, right? If it was me, I'd probably have a website somewhere that told you why that company was liquidated because I would push that information forward and say this is what happened, this is why it happens and this is how we work through it and this is what we did. So definitely company's house, if you want to outsource some of that, if they've got their accounts online, send them to your accountant, pay your accountant to do a little report on them, right? That's the first place I'd start and then I think you must remember we do business with people we know like and trust as human beings, right? So do you know them? Because you should be knowing them before you do that. How do you get to know them well? What mechanism is there to get to know them? How do they solve that problem for you? Do you like them? Because if you don't that relationship is not going to endure. If you've got second thoughts, trust your gut and then ultimately do you trust them? And the only real way if you're going to do any serious business with someone is there's going to be the crumbs style approach where we do a little bit to start with, and there's always going to be more to come in the medium term, not life savings or had a good year bonus this year. Just going to pour all of that into XYZ in the Northeast that I don't really know, who's only incorporated his company 14 months ago off the back of a property course, taught by someone who doesn't really know how to do it themselves. I happen to know that you are very big on this but perhaps you could talk about it a little bit, the importance of community. That's why we started our Partners in Property Network in the first place. It was very much focused around real property rather than let's create a sales funnel to sell people lots of courses and stuff like that and I have to be cautious these days I don't want to be a bit hypocrite about the whole thing. We do do an element of consultancy we prefer to call consultancy because it sounds more business like we are the worst sellers and marketeers in the world because we tell you how hard it's going to be, we don't say it's going to be an easy life. I really enjoy it. It's a bit of a pressure cooker environment everybody gets to know each other really well, we really get down to the bare bones of people's businesses and then help to build them back up to make them stronger, leave them with a plan for the next twelve months, three years, five years, ten years. Obviously they differ in their level of detail and then they also get some support afterwards. So one accountability call a month and then six months down the line we have a catch up day in person where we go over what everybody's done, whether they're hitting their targets, what tweaks might need to be made in the plan, and then send them off again. I mean, we do have a WhatsApp group that stays active after the event. It's a small tight knit group of people. This year we're expecting to take about twelve and the quality of the relationship you can form even in only a week's time actually makes the whole thing worthwhile. The better education, if you like, out there seems to be around communities now rather than sort of paid courses. Yeah, I think that's right. I'd like to think we were one of the pioneers in doing that really, because we were one of the first to sort of have the well, a meeting once a month is great with the right people in the room, but people want 24/7. This is the modern age apart from anything else and also there's people who are potentially having struggles and problems where someone else is having the same problem and they can't necessarily talk to someone near and dear to them because they're not close to it, it's not their thing, they're not interested. So we actually, as part of parts of property, we do an accountability buddy thing every year where we match people that we think will work well together and they will report to each other over the course of the year just to keep each other strong. And then we've got the broader community where people can join online, attend in person. You just get some fabulous people in the room. I'm delighted that I had anything to do with it, founding it alongside too. It really pleases me. And there are people who are much better sales and marketeers than us, who also have products that are valuable and they're not charging the earth for these things. People, they paid 100 quid a month for something or something of that order. It's not 25 grand plus that for a course that is still not going to do it for you and you're not necessarily going to come out with the very best advice at the end of it. Well, I haven't done any property training, but it always seemed to me that the biggest benefit of it was the networking. So if you take just the networking element out of it and create a community, then you're basically getting all of that for much less of the price. But the frustrating thing for expats all of us, it's great to sort of see people on Zoom like this, but we don't get that chance to kind of shake hands and look people in the eye, not through a screen, et cetera, et cetera. The thing is John, I think you're doing your bit through this podcast to raise there's more of you guys out there than anybody realizes and there is a possibility to have an overseas get together depending on where you are, of like minded, interested people. So it can be done and I'm sure people can come to you. Now we've started doing it in Hong Kong. We have a meet up once a month and I've asked listeners if anyone in any part of the world wants to kind of set up their own meetup. I'm happy to announce it here, but I was just wondering your online version, because I know that you have meetups in Manchester, Bristol and London. How about the online version of that? Would that work well for expats? Yeah. We have a Birmingham as well. We currently do our online meeting

30 P.m. UK time. I realize there'll be some parts of the world that won't work very well for thinking of Hong Kong. It's not good for us. So perhaps for us, we need to think, you know, what, if we have demand to do that and a dozen people who wanted to do it, then maybe we do one at 630 in the morning or whatever instead. My guess, from looking at my own data, that probably suits the American side of the world, but probably not this side of the world. Yeah. So that's a really good piece of feedback and I will take that back to the partners and give that some serious consideration. Thank you. If people want to contact you, Adam, what should they do? Get LinkedIn. Adam G. Lawrence. That's the best way. I publish my supplement once a week. Comes out in the Partners In Property blog, 630 in the morning, UK time. Share it on my LinkedIn, share it in our Facebook free group,

00 UK time in the morning. On a Sunday, we do a little live session with JMP, you know well from the Auction Buyers Club and Helen, surely, as well. I really appreciate the time that you've given us, Adam. Fantastic. Great stuff. Thanks very much. Really enjoy it. Three things to pick out from this week's show are firstly, Adam's top tip for investing for the long term by doing your homework around population growth forecasts, people will always need somewhere to live, and as the population grows and successive governments fail to meet their housing targets, then areas with increasing numbers of people should thrive and grow in value. The second highlight was Adam's handy hints around due diligence. It's not the first time we've been advised to check out prospective property partners on company's house, but Adam had some specific suggestions around exactly what to look for. If the company you're investigating has been up and running for more than 18 months but hasn't filed any accounts, you should be asking them why not? If they claim to have a large portfolio, there should be charges which would verify this. Have they had any companies liquidated or been struck off? And if you're happy with the answers to any or all of these questions. Then dip your toes into your new partnership and use what Adam called the crumb approach, whereby you start slowly to test the water and see if people do what they say they're going to do before you go all in. And the final takeaway from today's episode is the importance of community. And it doesn't have to be something you pay for. When I was starting out, I would challenge myself to write three emails a week to podcast hosts and guests just to ask for their advice or to seek further clarification on something I'd heard them say. People in property are less protective of their knowledge than in many other sectors. Not everyone will reply, but of all the people who got back to me, only one person refused to bestow his wisdom unless I paid for it first. And if you want to know who that was, and you live in Hong Kong, I'll tell you at our next meetup. For this week's exotic listener location, we're off to Bali in Indonesia, which brings back happy memories for me, as we had a really nice Easter holiday there back in 2016 in beautiful Uber, which I've heard has since become a popular destination for digital nomads. But although we have had listeners in Uber before, they must have moved on. However, we have had some listeners in other parts of Bali in the past week, so if you're one of them, why not get in touch at the podcast website, which is, once again www.expatpropertystory.com. And like SS from earlier in the show, let us know the one thing that you're struggling with in your Expat Property story, because the chances are that if it's challenging you, it's challenging someone else, too. So if you're struggling with something, let me know. And if I can help, I will. And if I can't, I'll point you in the direction of someone who can. Thank you to Adam Lawrence for appearing on this week's show, and to you for listening. In the meantime, share the show to spread the word. You've been listening to expats property story.