Tom Mondoux
Feb 19, 2022
How Onwing Can Provide Better Solutions to Clients
Buying a home in America can be a daunting endeavor for just about anyone. Moving across states, or maybe from one coast to the other, makes it incrementally more difficult. And buying from half a world away will introduce several more unique logistical hurdles that you might not have even thought about.
Here's 5 of the biggest challenges you can expect to encounter when buying a home from abroad -- and coincidentally, the Top 5 ways that Onwing can fly-in to help!
Timing is Everything
If you are interested in completing most of the home buying process while overseas so you have a home to move into almost right away, you may be lucky to get 1 or 2 weeks of house hunting leave/vacation at your future location. And if you leave the home buying until after your move, you will certainly want to minimize the amount of time spent in temporary housing. Either way, you will want to be very efficient with the limited time available to select a desirable home. The more you know in advance about potential neighborhoods, housing must-haves, and your budget, the less time you need to spend narrowing your search with the limited time you have to physically view homes, and the greater your odds of finding the perfect home to make an offer on.
At Onwing we value establishing relationships with our clients well before they are house hunting (or even thinking about house hunting), so that when the time does come, they can be most ready to 'pull the trigger' on the home of their dreams. You can reach out to us months, even years, ahead of your potential PCS (rotation date) and we will be happy to meet with you to discuss reaching any of your short and long term real estate purchase (or investing) goals. With significant time working together, we can help you maximize your financial profile during your overseas tour so that you will be able to make competitive bids when it is time to move. As soon as you get an idea of where your next duty station might be, we will get to work on analyzing that market with you, narrowing down what areas of the market you want to target your search to, and establishing relationships with the other service providers on the ground that will help you on your journey.
Onwing can give its clients access to premium, subscription-level research services that surpass what is publicly available online. We can create customized home searches that send you reports of homes meeting your criteria. On the financial side, we can discuss available loan products and get you lender pre-approval prior you submitting any offers. That way, when it's the perfect time to strike on your new home, you'll be as prepared as possible, and sellers will take your offers seriously.
Sight Unseen Landmines
It might be scary to think about making a purchase as large as a home when you haven't even had a chance to walk through it yourself, but that is a reality for many overseas buyers. Despite your best preparations, that 1 or 2 week housing hunting leave may not be enough to land a purchase contract on a desirable home, especially in the ultra-competitive seller's market seen recently. Thanks to the industry's adaptation to the COVID pandemic, virtual home tours have become much more commonplace, to the benefit of all homebuyers but especially the overseas buyer. Still, the credibility of a virtual tour relies heavily on who is conducting it. For example, the "virtual tour" posted by the seller's agent (a salesperson trying to sell you a home) should not be relied on. Here are some questions to ask yourself when arranging for your own virtual tour of a property to ensure you are getting the most unvarnished truth about a property:
Who do I have walking through the property on my behalf? Is it someone I can trust, or are they bound by a fiduciary obligation to represent my best interests? Do they in any way benefit from me buying the home?
Will the virtual tour be recorded and given to me later, or conducted live?
If recorded, is there a clear plan provided as to what to look for and to what level of detail?
If live, does the tour provider have a high-quality mobile connection that does not rely on good cellular reception at the home or use of the homeowner's private wifi? How will they mitigate lost or poor quality connections that can completely sabotage a live home tour? Is there a backup plan if something like that were to occur?
What is the quality of the recording equipment being used? How skilled is the tour provider at using it?
Will the tour be privately scheduled? Or concurrent with an open house? (We wouldn't recommend the latter unless it's a precursor to a more detailed tour later if the house passes the first round.)
If you work with Onwing, we'll work with you to make sure all the above questions have well thought out answers, because we know that NO HOMEBUYER wants to move into a house with any surprises! Unfortunately, home sellers have a lot of methods available to disguise those surprises. To combat that, we've developed our own techniques and less-obvious signs and red-flags to look out for during an initial inspection prior to making any purchase offer. Additionally, we will help you work with the licensed home inspectors you choose to hire during any due diligence phase of the buying process, with a list of questions and considerations similar to the one above.
Oversights during the home touring and inspection phases can lead to future headaches and worries about whether you made a costly mistake buying your home, which can be a terrifying feeling. Since the risks of oversights are greater when you cannot perform your own inspections, it is really important to have people you can trust at your side and working on your behalf. At Onwing, we will always work hard to find the reason NOT to buy the house, so that when we hopefully come up short, you can feel good about it.
Long-Distance Relationships Really Work?
Well maybe they can sometimes, but they're almost certainly harder...and the same can be said when it comes to the multiple people you'll discover 'helping' you purchase your home. Real estate agents, loan brokers, loan processors and underwriters, inspectors, appraisers, escrow agents...and in addition to these 'primaries' you may find yourself getting emails from some of their assistants whom you've never previously heard of. It can get overwhelming and confusing. It can lead to doubts about who is really working for YOU as opposed to already looking for their next client while they pass your file down a chain of lesser-experienced assistants and other service providers. The overseas homebuyer may not have the ability to meet ANY of these individuals to match a face with a name, only adding further to the impersonal feeling of these relationships that will govern one of the more personal decisions of their lifetime.
We offer a different model at Onwing, one that we think can be more successful for some homebuyers by mitigating many of the above concerns. Rather than embed ourselves in a property market, we co-locate with our pool of potential clients (currently in Japan) and offer our expertise and industry connections in the markets they will be moving to. The onwing you meet and hire (after one or several face-to-face meetings) will be YOUR onwing, from beginning to end. There will be no confusion about that. And since we can offer both real estate brokerage services and arrange financing, we can give our clients the convenience of streamlining two of the biggest service provider roles described above.* You don't need to suffer a long distance relationship; you can find a trusting one right where you are (if you're currently in Japan, that is!).
*Clients using Onwing Expat Realty's real estate brokerage services are in no way obligated to use its financing services, too, or vice versa. Per law, it will be immediately disclosed, and require client approval, if it is apparent that Onwing Expat Realty will gain compensation for both real estate and financing services while representing a buyer in a single transaction.
Time Zone Follies
Further compounding the challenges of managing a large team of individuals working toward closing on your new home purchase is the large time zone difference between you and them. This seemingly basic consideration, if miscalculated or miscommunicated, can lead to numerous mix-ups, especially when time zones transition the International Date Line. Not all real estate professionals are accustomed to working with clients across such broad time/day spans from their own. Some of what you might experience: incorrectly scheduled meetings, tele-meetings at inconvenient times of day for either yourself or the other party, longer turnaround times to emailed inquiries, more missed calls, incorrectly dated documents, longer snail-mail shipping times, and more. Some of these may just be nuisances that can be powered through, while some may result in unforeseen delays that can put a deal in jeopardy.
The Onwing team is used to operating where its clients live and accustomed to working through time zone differences in order to make a deal progress smoothly. Our clients can expect to meet with us at times that are more convenient for them, and even meet to talk over a coffee if that's what's desired. As licensed realtors® and mortgage brokers, we are equipped to answer a broad scope of our clients' biggest questions and concerns, and they can expect same day responses to their emailed inquiries. On issues that do require coordination with CONUS-based parties, we can relieve some of the inconvenience to our clients by coordinating on their behalf.
Cultural Barriers (to Wedded Happiness)
If you're an American with a foreign spouse (or a non-American yourself), you should be aware that not all real estate is created equal throughout the world. This is especially true when you compare American and Japanese cultural attitudes toward real estate. In contrast to America, real estate is NOT an appreciating asset that most Japanese residents associate with long term wealth-building. Real estate's value is mostly limited to its practical use (a necessary place to live), and like other practical goods such as automobiles, a house loses value from the moment it is purchased to the end of its useful life. For these reasons (and others), it is not nearly as common for Japanese residents to buy and sell personal homes as frequently as upwardly mobile American families might.
With this in mind, Onwing can uniquely assist our multi-cultural family clients. We have native Japanese speakers on our team that can explain the many nuances of an American real estate transaction with empathy that may elude a non-native speaker. 'What will the process be like?' 'Why do American homes usually RISE in value?' 'What do these stacks and stacks of documents I'm signing actually say?' 'What is 'community property'?' 'How do American loan products work?' These are questions that we are expertly capable of answering to help reduce the feelings of stress and tension that can accompany such large joint decisions in a marriage, even WITHOUT cultural disparities at play.
Request Your Onwing Now
We know that our business model is a little unconventional. Buyers may think that everyone representing them should be firmly established in the neighborhoods they are moving to. But at Onwing, we believe the biggest keys to success in any transaction are having relationships created with trust and good communications. From there, the rest is fairly easy by leveraging available technologies combined with our industry knowledge and networks. We think we can achieve all that better than our CONUS-based competition by being right where our clients currently live.