What Living Overseas Has Taught Me About Investing in UK Property
When we moved to Singapore in 2020, I knew I'd be managing my UK property investments from overseas. What I hadn't anticipated was quite how complete that separation from the UK was going to be.
We arrived during Covid. Leaving Singapore was difficult and getting back in could be harder still. I didn't return to the UK at all for the first sixteen months and, when I eventually did, returning to Singapore involved quarantine.
There really wasn't the option of popping back because something needed sorting out with a property.
Looking back, that experience probably changed the way I invest more than I realised at the time.
Living thousands of miles away forced me to separate ownership from operation. It made me think much more carefully about property management, trust, information and resilience. Perhaps most importantly, it changed the sort of property I actually want to own.
Can You Successfully Invest in UK Property While Living Overseas?
Yes, but I think distance exposes weaknesses in an investment rather quickly.
When you live near your properties, it's surprisingly easy to compensate for weak systems yourself. A contractor needs chasing, so you make the call. Something needs checking, so you go and have a look. The managing agent isn't quite doing what you expected, so you quietly fill the gap.
Everything continues to work, but part of the system making it work is actually you.
Moving overseas removed that option for me.
I had to rely upon people in the UK and build investments that could operate without my physical presence. That didn't make property investment impossible. In some respects, I think it made me more disciplined.
Distance didn't create weaknesses in an investment. It simply made them much harder for me to cover with my own time.
What Makes a Good Managing Agent for an Overseas Landlord?
Most properties are relatively easy to manage when the tenant pays, nothing breaks and everyone behaves reasonably.
You discover rather more about your managing agent when something goes wrong.
A boiler fails. A tenant stops paying. An unexpected compliance issue appears. A repair becomes considerably more expensive than anticipated.
Living overseas has made me very clear about what I want from a managing agent in those situations.
I don't simply want someone who forwards the problem to me and asks what I'd like to do. I want someone who understands the property, investigates the problem, communicates clearly and uses their judgement.
Sometimes they will need my decision, particularly where significant expenditure or risk is involved. At other times, I expect them to deal with the issue themselves.
The important skill is knowing the difference.
Good property management isn't really tested when everything is working. You discover its value when it isn't.
How Do You Know Whether You Can Trust a Property Manager?
I'm not sure you ever completely know at the beginning.
My years as a teacher and school leader probably prepared me for this better than I realised. In schools, trust was rarely created by one grand gesture. It developed through hundreds of fairly ordinary interactions.
You watched how people behaved, whether they did what they said they would do, how they responded when something went wrong and whether they were prepared to tell you something you might not particularly want to hear.
I've found much the same thing in property and business.
Trust accumulates through evidence.
Does your managing agent tell you about a problem promptly, or do you discover it later? Do they simply present problems, or do they recommend solutions? When they tell you something has been completed, does the information you receive support that?
Over time, those interactions tell you a great deal.
How Much Information Should an Overseas Landlord Receive?
Trusting somebody doesn't mean having no oversight.
I don't need to know about every conversation with a tenant or every minor repair. In fact, receiving that much information would largely defeat the purpose of having professional management.
But I do want enough visibility to understand whether the portfolio is healthy.
For me, that means being able to see whether rent is being collected, significant arrears are developing, important compliance requirements are being dealt with, maintenance expenditure is broadly sensible and anything unusual is being escalated appropriately.
The principle is relatively simple: report the important information and highlight the exceptions.
That allows an owner to maintain oversight without becoming involved in the day-to-day operation of every property.
Distance has taught me that trust and oversight aren't opposites. Good systems allow you to have both.
Should Property Investment Be Passive?
I wouldn't describe property as completely passive.
Buildings need maintaining, tenants change, regulation evolves and occasionally decisions have to be made. Anyone buying property on the assumption that nothing will ever require their attention is likely to be disappointed.
But there is a difference between owning an investment that occasionally requires a decision and owning one that has quietly become another occupation.
I've known landlords who coordinate every repair, chase every payment, speak directly to every contractor and personally resolve almost every problem in their portfolio.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Some people enjoy managing their own properties and are very good at it.
It simply isn't the model I've chosen.
When assessing the return from an investment, I think it's worth considering the owner's time as well as the obvious financial costs. A property producing an attractive yield but requiring several hours of work every week is a different investment from one producing the same return with professional management.
I want to spend my time deciding what to own, why I own it and occasionally what needs to change.
I don't particularly want what I own deciding how I spend my time.
What Type of Property Suits an Overseas Investor?
Living overseas has made me rather less attracted to investments requiring constant intervention.
These days, I tend to value fairly ordinary characteristics:
strong underlying tenant demand;
sensible and sustainable financing;
manageable maintenance requirements;
sufficient cash flow and reserves;
competent local management; and
enough margin for error when something doesn't go according to plan.
None of that sounds particularly exciting.
That's rather the point.
I've written before about my preference for relatively boring property portfolios. Living overseas has helped me understand where that preference came from.
A complicated investment can produce an excellent return, but complexity creates more places where assumptions can fail. If the investment only works because the owner is constantly intervening, I want that reflected in my assessment of it.
Why Does Resilience Matter in Property Investment?
No property portfolio operates perfectly all the time.
During the years I've managed UK investments from Singapore and Indonesia, boilers have broken, tenants haven't always paid, unexpected costs have appeared and occasionally something has happened that required considerably more attention than I would have liked.
That's property.
The question isn't whether problems will occur. It's whether the investment has enough resilience to absorb them when they do.
That might mean sufficient cash reserves to pay for an unexpected repair, enough cash flow to cope with a period without rent, appropriate insurance, sensible borrowing or a managing agent capable of resolving an issue before it becomes considerably larger.
The strongest investment isn't necessarily the one with the highest projected return when everything goes according to plan.
Sometimes it's the one that still works reasonably well when it doesn't.
What Have I Learned From Managing UK Property From Abroad?
If I reduced the experience of the last few years to a handful of lessons, they would probably be these:
Separate ownership from operation. Decide which decisions genuinely require you and build systems for the rest.
Choose good people and allow them to use their judgement. Professional management has limited value if every decision still comes back to the landlord.
Trust people, but maintain visibility. You should know enough about your portfolio to recognise when something isn't right.
Include your own time when thinking about investment returns. A portfolio requiring constant owner intervention isn't necessarily passive simply because a spreadsheet calls it an investment.
Build resilience rather than expecting perfection. Problems are inevitable. The important question is whether the property, finances and management can cope with them.
Boring can be a virtue. Strong demand, sensible debt, manageable maintenance and competent management may not produce the most exciting investment story, but they make remote ownership considerably easier.
A Final Thought
Living overseas hasn't made me want property where nothing ever goes wrong.
That property doesn't exist.
Instead, it has made me much more interested in what happens when something does go wrong: who deals with it, what information reaches me, how much financial resilience sits behind the investment and whether an ordinary problem remains an ordinary problem.
Perhaps that's the biggest change in the way I now assess property.
I don't just ask what return an investment might produce when everything works.
I increasingly ask how well it will cope when something doesn't.
And if I'm going to own it from several thousand miles away, I rather like knowing that the occasional problem isn't going to require me to get on an aeroplane.
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