Island Real Estate
This afternoon I drove around the Dutch side of St. Maarten with my good friend Doug Hoekstra, looking at some neighborhoods through real estate investor's eyes. Doug owns a charming 2 bedroom apartment on the French side near Orient Beach. He bought the condo a few years ago when 90 US Dollar Cents bought 1 Euro. Today, we have to spend $1.30 to buy one Euro. That's why Dough decided to sell his place. With a 20% appreciation and the dramatically different exchange rate, he will make a handsome profit and is looking to reinvest his funds into property on the Dutch side (where prices are quoted in US currency).

I noticed a while ago that Dutch St. Maarten has an incredible selection of well prices luxury property, but there is very little available in the price segment below $250,000. The French side though has condos from $40,000 upwards, but the brokers don't show much interest in these low priced units and rarely offer them. Because there is no multiple listing system on the island, a potential buyer has to go from realtor to realtor to get a market overview. Some brokers will flat out deny that there is anything on the market for under half a million, while others might have a neat little bargain somewhere.

I showed Dough some neighborhoods which haven't seen a lot of investment in the past years and most properties didn't appear to be well maintained. But we found out that deals are not readily available anymore: where there was zero action for many years, suddenly the local market seems to explode and houses, townhouses, condos are sold as soon as they are on the market.

Several large new developments are being build and selling well. This creates an amazing market momentum and seems to pull along existing real estate. After a few hours Doug and I pretty much agreed that it is high time to buy something or being left out of the boom happening at this time

We also identified some extremely hot opportunities, which I don't want to share in detail here.

- posted by Jan @ 11:29 PM