Opportunity opens for offshore investors as firm offers property finance
For Nigerian offshore investors, property finance opportunity is knocking on doors for investment in one of the world’s mature and burgeoning real estate markets.
This is a compelling opportunity for investors in an environment like Nigeria where property finance is difficult to find and, where available, too expensive to afford.
This is what Dave Kubak Consulting, a new real estate brokerage firm, is in Nigeria to offer potential investors in the US property market, especially in Chicago.
“Financing can be a little tricky if you’re not sure how to go about it or who to talk to. What we do at Dave Kubak is to help clients gather all the requirements necessary to access financing from our lenders who can approve up to $5 million for residential and investment property”, explained Yele Kufeji, the company’s CEO.
Kufeji is a licensed real estate broker in the State of Chicago with Berkshire Hathaway, but has just set up Dave Kubak Consulting in Lagos, Nigeria to offer financial services.
He told BusinesDay in Lagos that “interest rates are between 4 percent and 8 percent with a variety of options within a 30-year loan period. These include 5-year fixed rates with 25-years fluctuating, 7-year fixed rates with 23-fluctuating, and 30-year fixed rates”.
Dave Kubak advises and helps to structure clients’ applications that would make lenders offer them lowest rates possible. It also helps clients shop for the kind of property that doesn’t require a monthly contribution from clients personally to cover the mortgages and taxes. In other words, the company helps clients to get a property where renting out to tenants would most definitely cover their monthly commitments.
Kufeji offered insights on why Chicago was the new investment destination where both local and global market fundamentals were not only looking up but also driving up prices in favour of buy-to-let investors.
In his reasoning, the sentiments and uncertainty of Brexit is seen to create a ripple effect across major cities in the world. Frankfurt, for example, has seen real estate values rise by over 50 percent since 2015 which is huge for an already developed major city.
“A recent study by Swiss Bank, UBS, says Hong Kong has the most overvalued housing market while Chicago offers bargains, suggesting that real estate prices in most big cities remain too high, even though they’ve slipped lately”, he noted.
According to him, the UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index has found that Chicago is the most undervalued major city in the world in a list that includes Toronto, London, Paris, Zurich, New York, Hong Kong and Frankfurt.
Kufeji projected that the Obama Presidential center to be completed in Chicago in 2020 was certainly going to drive real estate values across the city.
“The election of Jay Pritzker as governor of Illinois is a promising sign for the state. Pritzker is a business man whose family owns one of the largest hotel chains in the world”, the Hyatt Hotel Group, he said.
“A number of the policies Pritzker has talked about introducing have been aimed at bringing more business in the state which, in turn, would affect real estate values positively”, he added.
CHUKA UROKO