Let’s go back to your days managing a full-time orthodontics practice. Like many of your colleagues, you were encouraged to invest in real estate. But the returns were not as advertised?

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing – you always look back and think, “Oh, if I had known that, I would have done it differently…I would have been a lot more efficient.”

Like a lot of investors, I tended to gravitate towards buying rental units. But it takes a lot of time to set that up and manage. I didn’t have that kind of time. 

And you tend to buy a unit in your local town, which may not always be the best area. From a scale standpoint, Europe is similar to the United States. In the U.K., when we buy something in Spain, that’s really the same as someone in the U.S. buying on the East Coast versus the West Coast. And when you’re dealing with those kinds of distances, it’s really very hard to spend the time required to manage the property, to find tenants if things go wrong, and that sort of thing.

And then when you add the costs involved in establishing a rental investment, compared to what you get back, you may find that unless you’ve got into the right market, the returns aren’t that good. And a lot of people that I’ve talked to will buy investment property, and then two or three years later, they sell it, thinking “I’m never going to do that again, it costs too much in time and money!”
And you may not have the knowledge to invest wisely. It’s the same when I talk to many of my colleagues.

So part of your formula is to reach out to fellow professionals?

Yes.

Physicians in the U.S. devote so much time to dealing with PATIENTS; It can be difficult for them to manage the business side of their practices. So they tend to trust their investment strategy to outside sources.

You get someone else to invest for you, and you don’t always know what they’re investing in. Also, if you want to invest internationally, that’s a difficult process. Yet they can be very good markets. That’s what PDS is trying to do. We have the experience…the knowledge…the ability to analyze domestic and international markets.

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