A brand new apartment on a golf course, with beautiful views of the ocean. It was nine years old but due to the Spanish company going bust, it had never been sold or lived in and was being offered at a discounted price.
This was an interesting one because I bought in May of 2015 and the main reason I bought it was because I wanted to have exposure to the Euro especially with all the uncertainty surrounding the UK ties to Europe. At the time this property was completed (2008/2009) there was a lot of financial difficulty in Spain (even worse than in the UK) and a lot of developments had gone bust. When it did this property was for sale for over 600,000 Euro!. It was later bought out by a fund and then put back on the market in 2014. They were quite keen to start getting the sales going and therefore they were offering a discount to people so they could move quickly.
As the developer sells more properties the prices are being pushed up. The property is now worth £304,000. A lot of the increase if the move in the currency because the euro is now 1.15 to the pound. Do you see how you can make money without the property value even moving up massively?
I ended up locking in this 1.15 exchange rate by purchasing a financial product called ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) which meant I could lock in the currency rate without having to remortgage or sell the property.