How it all started?

How it all started?
When I was recently visiting London, England I noted that Britain’s Channel 4 Television had a programme called How It All Started. This related the beginning of the World with Big Bang kicking off and thereafter life followed etc, etc
This gave me the idea of relating how The International Explorer came to being. Unlike the day when Big Bang occurred, this was a calm late Autumn evening in the New Forest area on the south coast of England. We had been running a mortgage business there for about eight and a half years. The company known as The Mortgage Explorer had been dealing, and still deals, with all aspects of UK’s residential, commercial and investment mortgage enquiries. We were just about to close when the following email arrived:

Looking to buy a 500,000 CAD property in Vancouver, Canada. Already own a property in Sydney Australia, no mortgage, valued at 400,000 AUD. Combined income of £80,000 p.a. Would like to rent out the property for a few years before moving into it. (UNQUOTE).

The clients were married – he was from Australia. She was from Canada. They lived and worked in London on a working permit. What they did not say in the email was that they had no deposit.

We had never done a mortgage for a foreign based property but were not about to say no. My colleagues and I decided instead that we would apply the same principle as we had done at The Mortgage Explorer and extend it to cover the World. But hey! This was different: no deposit, applicants from two different hemispheres, they might have shared a roof in England but the properties they were buying, were diagonally opposite in the Pacific Ocean. There is no better thing in life than a challenge. We took it on:

We found an International lender that would agree to re mortgage the flat in Sydney and upon doing so release capital. This was used as the deposit on the flat in Vancouver, Canada. The clients were given the choice to have the two mortgages in Pound Sterling as they earned in that currency, in Australian Dollars as the first flat was rented out in Sydney with the rent in Aussie Dollars and the mortgage in Canada in Canadian Dollars as the flat were to be let out in that currency. They chose the last two choices so as to alleviate the risk of currency fluctuation which can be sudden sometimes.

Finally to comply totally with The Mortgage Explorer’s philosophy on tax efficiency we researched the tax rules in Australia and Canada. We found that as both flats were being let out with taxable rental incomes there was room to claim tax relief on the interest paid on the loans incurred.

The whole business took 5 weeks to complete bearing in mind that Christmas and the end of the year festivities came along too. Upon receiving a thank you card from the clients with a cheque for our broker’s fee and reflecting on how we had experienced our Big Bang we decided to launch The International Explorer. Today 30 months after its launch The International Explorer covers 18 countries where the World’s citizens can buy or re finance properties in any of the major currencies. Faithful to our roots we also and forever seek tax efficiency whenever and wherever feasible for these clients.