Post Acquisition Strategy

How We Manage the Properties We’ve Acquired in Emerging Markets

As previously mentioned, our decision to invest in raw land was due to the fact that the most marked risk relates to managing the asset post-acquisition. This form of real estate requires the least management while allowing us to appreciate broader trends.

Our post acquisition management revolves around executing our initial acquisition strategy, while preserving title.

Preserve Title

While little effort is required to preserve title in most First World nations, an intentional strategy of title preservation is imperative for foreign landowners in emerging markets.

Title preservation need not be cumbersome but it must be consistently managed. Assembling a good team in the nation where the property is located is usually the first step in a well executed title preservation strategy.

We work with local attorneys to establish our local presence and implement local documentation to maintain our control of the ownership interest pending the eventual sale of the property. As a word of caution: We must typically discard dozens of law firms before settling on the ones who are best able to participate in our efforts.

Recording Our Ownership Interest

Local attorneys are savvy about the complexities and traditions in certain areas for registering your ownership interest with local legal registries. It is essential that we maintain favorable relations with respected and reputable local attorneys to help us properly register our ownership interest.

According to custom and unlike the practice in some First World nations, sometimes we need to give the attorney a small interest in the property to increase his interest in helping us initiate, protect and preserve our ownership of the land we’ve acquired.

Hiring Locals to Have a Presence on the Property

Often the interests we purchase require that we maintain a presence on the land to comply with sometimes ancient local customs, laws and traditions that relate to maintaining claim to q property.

We are adept at locating local farmers, or other local and responsible residents, to reside on, or regularly perform maintenance or other work on, our properties to maintain an ongoing presence. This is an essential aspect of managing ownership of raw land in an emerging market.

The work may include some improvements in the form of ownership and minor improvements in the land to make it more presentable for sale even though we are, in general, preserving the raw land character of the land.

Add Value

Our primary strategy to add value to the property post acquisition is in the re-designation of the land’s end use. Typically we do this by obtaining title to untitled land, re-zoning, obtaining key permits, master planning the property, or repositioning the property through effective branding.

Scalable Model

Within this framework, our strategy is to effectively manage the project with as little capital expenditure as possible. We implement this through our use of the arbitrage in labor prices in the global labor pool through international outsourcing.

Our philosophy is a scalable management model that takes advantage of desirable, global labor rates with an ability to add or subtract labor as the project dictates.

Effective Marketing

Once we have acquired the property, we immediately implement our asset disposition strategies. An obvious reason for this is so that we don’t miss an opportunity to sell the property. Beyond that, our marketing system helps us stay in touch with the market.

As we get feedback from potential buyers, we are better able to make acquisition decisions based on the needs of actual buyers, rather than uneducated guesses.

Our overall marketing philosophy for selling emerging market real estate can be summed up as follows:
1. The buyer who is a good candidate for purchasing our property needs to be able to find it when they look.

2. When they find it, the information needs to be presented in a way that persuades them to buy.

Our marketing strategy is detailed in the Exit Strategy section of the site.