How Can I Invest In The United States If I Live In A Foreign Country?

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“Dear Joe: Overseas potential investors are watching and learning from you, or at least I do. Please try to illustrate how a foreign investor can use your methods for active real estate activity. What are the special obstacles they’re going to face? What needs to be solved prior to initiation of activities? To which extent are your lessons and events relevant to them for U.S. remote activities?” – Nir Hazotski, Israel

Joe: First of all, you don’t have to be in the United States to do these deals. We have people that are doing it in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, different parts of Europe, in the Philippines – we have people that are doing them in those locations. I have a guy in Kazakhstan who’s doing work in the old eastern bloc, in the country of Kazakhstan. If there is a free market for real estate in those areas and also if there’s a mortgage process in place or at least seller ownership in place for seller financing, that means that real estate is transferred by deed and it’s possible to do it there.
 
Joe: So all of these things are possible in every place that you go. The difference is that when you go into a place that’s never heard of a lease option before or doesn’t know what a lease option is, you have to do a little bit of educating to help people understand how that process works, but it also means you don’t have any competition – nobody else is doing it, so you can bring a service to a community that doesn’t know how to use it and solve problems for them in ways that real estate agents and other professionals cannot solve those problems and sellers cannot solve problems, just like we do here.
 
Joe: Except of course that, here, you have more people who understand what a lease option is, so it makes it easier to define and explain. It also means that there’s going to be more competition; there’s more people that are going to be using that process, but you can’t let competition stop you from doing business, and it means that there’s a lot of business there.
 
Joe: If you want to do it overseas, there’s nothing really that keeps you from doing it overseas. You do have to have a way to collect money and that usually means a local bank account, so you need to set up a bank account here or have someone that you have connections with here that can set up a bank account for you and then be able to transfer that money into it.
 
Joe: I have a friend in Lebanon and they’re doing deals and its always a complicated process to get the money from their local bank account and then have it transferred into Lebanon, so there’s always difficulties making that stuff happen, so you have to decide, ‘Do I want to bring that money in so I can live in Lebanon or Israel? Do I want to bring that money into my own country?’ and if so, and live on it, which most of you probably want to do, then you need to figure out a way to do that with your tax guy and with a local tax guy.
 
Joe: So, you probably want a good CPA here and a bank account and you probably want to set up a limited liability corporation here as well. Most importantly, though, you want to get legal advice. You want to get proper legal advice (because I’m not an attorney – I don’t even play one on TV. I can’t give legal advice). I’m just giving you an idea of what’s possible and tell you what other people are doing that are using my system. I have people all over the world who are using this system from out of the area in the area and from out of the area in their own areas, and it works in those areas. And if you’re from the U.K., we have GumTree set up, and if you’re from Canada, we have kijiji.ca set up, which is eBay classifieds except it’s in Canada and it gives you access to more Canadian listings. So hopefully that answers the question.
 
Joe: Don’t let being out of the country or being out of the area stop you from doing deals, even if you’re in Indiana and you want to do business in Kentucky or one state over, it’s okay – you can do it – you can do all of this stuff on the phone – you just have to learn how to talk on the phone and you have to learn how to talk to people. Alright, I hope that helps.