CW 520 – Ross Lauder – Ireland’s Economy, US Real Estate Investing, and More with Regular CW Listener

Jason Hartman is currently visiting Ireland and one of his listeners asked to meet with him personally while he was here. Ross Lauder talks on Ireland taxes, the Irish economic crash in 2008, and why Ross loves the US real estate market for income investing.

Key Takeaways:

[2:15] Ross has been listening to Jason’s show since 2009.

[5:05] Why is Ireland so appealing to corporations?

[12:05] Ireland has had two big votes recently. Same-sex marriage and trying to change the minimum presidential age from 35 down to 21.

[18:45] What’s happening with the real estate market in Ireland?

[28:02] Why does Ross like real estate?

[34:08] Jason is working on a new property tour with his team, so look forward to that.

Mentioned In This Episode:

JasonHartman.com

Tweetables:

The age of the president of Ireland can be 35, but you have this referendum to lower it to age 21.

Ireland is the fastest growing economy in Europe.

At the height of the Celtic Tiger before it all collapsed, you could get a 40 year mortgage.

Transcript

Jason Hartman:

Hey, welcome to the Creating Wealth show. This is your host Jason Hartman. This is episode 520 and I am talking to you today from beautiful Dublin, Ireland and even better than that, one of my listeners here reached out to me a few days ago, actually reached out to his investment counselor, Sara, and said why don’t we get together while you’re in Ireland.

So, we did and just had coffee and little desert and talked for a bit and he showed me around the Facebook headquarters here, the European Facebook headquarters and Google headquarters and he happens to be in the tech industry as so many people in Ireland are and just wanted to have him on the show to record with me a little bit here. His name is Ross Lauder. Ross, welcome, how are ya?

Ross Lauder:

I’m well, thanks, Jason. Great to have you in Ireland.

Jason:

Good, good. People are going to over listening to your accent. They’re going to think why do we have to listen to Jason when you’ve got such a great accent.

Ross:

I appreciate that.

Jason:

I guess you think I have an accent, right?

Ross:

You guys are the ones that speak funny, that’s right. Yeah.

Jason:

Awesome. Well, so, did you grow up in Dublin?

Ross:

Yes, I did. All my life. 30 odd years in this point of time. Not going to give away my age.

Jason:

Close enough for government work. So, you started listening, I was surprised, I thought you were a newer listener to the show, but you’ve actually been listening since 2009 you just told me.

Ross:

That’s right, yeah. I’ve been listening to your content since 2009 just really gravitated towards it. Thought it made an awful lot of sense in terms of protecting your financial future and really considering your position and how you’re going to cater to that going forward. It became something of a regular occurrence for me. Yeah, that’s right.

Jason:

Well, good stuff. Well, thank you for listening and, gosh, you know, we’ve talked about a bunch of interesting things at this little coffee session that we had and we’ve kind of jumped all over the place, but I wanted you to maybe give the listeners a little overview, Ross, if you would as to the story of the Celtic Tiger. I mean, Ireland had a huge boom and then a bust as most of the world has a bust as we know and it’s coming a back again and you just showed me around this techie area that’s just got beautiful architecture and kind of talked about that. Just give the listeners an over view of what’s going on here if you would.

Ross:

I suppose giving you the cliff notes, 3,500ft view, and a couple of moans won’t be all that easy, but I’ll definitely give it a go. I guess really the shift happened in the 90s where we identified the fact that we were in a fairly unique position in Europe where we had an English speaking country with a highly educated workforce, but a challenge really developing jobs, so we decided to throw open the economy to inward investment and lower our corporation tax rate very significantly to 12.5% headline you will hear about and it worked and it worked incredibly well and I guess what you have to understand from the Irish psyche is that you’ve got to own your own land. Having that section that you own and no body else does is really important to Irish people because of history. It’s something that is significant.

So, with that, increase in jobs came in natural affinity and love affair, quite frankly with property. So, we just started to acquire property at a huge rate and prices went up quite dramatically and beyond that I suppose the message spread about our success, our low tax rate, our highly educated work force..

Jason:

And you had a lot of tech companies come here. I know that Dell was a big one, Dell Computer in the day. I don’t know what their presence is here now..I mean, deal is obviously changed quite a bit over the years, but in its day it was an incredible success and these companies were just coming here like crazy, because they could kind of work the system, couldn’t they? They have that 12%, pretty reasonable headline right, but explain the listeners, Ross, if you would, what they were doing in terms of being off shore, but on shore at the same time and the way that they could really, really work that system that made it very desirable for business and that grew employment here a lot, right?

Ross:

Absolutely. So, the situation with Dell is quite interesting, because that was based largely on a manufacturing at the tax code ran out – I’m not as familiar with – I used to work for Dell, in fact, twice in my career, but that was really centered around manufacturing, but really the two industries that support our tax structure very effective are the ones that are IP based. So, pharmaceuticals and technology and the concept is this idea of the double Irish and what you’re effectively doing is you’re talking all of your IP, let’s say from a US tech company.

Jason:

Intellectual Property.

Ross:

Absolutely. You’re putting that into an offshore entity, so you’re having an Irish non-resident company setup in say, Jersey or the Bahamas and the like and..

Jason:

Very desirable jurisdictions, which would be Jersey, Isle of Man, Bahamas, Cook Islands. You know, there’s a bunch of other ones. Cayman Islands – around the world and so they would set up there and then what would they do.

Ross:

So that they have a 0% rate. So, what they’d do is that company would hold all the intellectual property for that entity outside of North America and then they would license it back to an Irish resident company here in Ireland at a margin that they were allowed to sell that IP app. So, effectively, two companies said to each other, which are in fact the same company, you can sell this, but your margin on it is 5%. Now, our headline right here in Ireland is 12.5%, so really what you’re doing is you’re paying 12.5% tax on a 5% margin when the real margin is quite substantially more than that.

Jason:

It might be 50% or even better than that.

Ross:

Can be 75%. Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s why you get hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars declared in earnings calls, but the profitability on that are the tax paid and the profitability is substantial, but the tax paid on that is a mere fraction. You’re talking 2% actual at that point.

Jason:

As an effective rate only 2%, even though the headline right is 12, right, so that’s really desirable for companies. Now, most people, and we’ve talked about politics a bit and by the way, you had two big referendums quite literally yesterday that went on in your country and I’m seeing signs all over as I’ve been touring around here that are interesting, but people on the left side of the political aisle, the liberal side, they would probably say, look, these companies are just scamming the system. It’s so unfair. They are not paying their taxes and I wonder and this is different than every case and most definitely it’s subject to opinion, but is that good or bad for Ireland, what they’re doing? I mean, they are certainty creating a lot of jobs here and pumping a lot of money into your economy, right?

Ross:

Absolutely. So, that’s a great question and it’s a conversation I’ve had a many of time with a lot of friends of mine, in fact. The first question I would ask is, well, do you have a job from that? Have you benefited, has the economy benefited from that deal, because at the end of the day you gotta play the cards you’re dealt, right? And they were the cards that we were dealt and I think effectively it creates jobs. So, the government sat down and they thought about this and at the end of the day, when people are employed, it’s generally a good thing for society and that’s what’s important.

Jason:

We haven’t gotten to this part of the conversation yet, but the corporate tax rate, very, very desirable as you’ve just described and that’s why the companies are setting up shop here, but the individual tax rate very undesirable, right? And so, all of those jobs that are created, those individuals pay taxes at a rather high rate and that flows into the government coffers. In addition, you’ve grown the economy substantial.

Ross:

Absolutely, so the deal they did was so that they would get it back in what you’d call payroll taxes and sales tax, which we call VAT, so that’s what..

Jason:

At what, 23%? Are you kidding me! That’s insane!

Ross:

Yeah, it used to be 21% until the country got in trouble back in 2008 and that went up quite sharply, but our income tax rate effectively is just over the 50% mark, which means getting hard is very, very difficult.

Jason:

Tell us a little bit about that. I mean, that’s yeah, 50% tax rate, that’s very, very high.

Ross:

Yeah, it certainty is and you definitely feel the pitch when you get paid. In addition to that we introduced a whole heap of new taxes since the economy took a turn and we were given a lot of money from the EU bail out. Things like water charges have come in, things – which are hugely controversial.

Jason:

Which, by the way, I’ve seen a lot of signs for that too. Irish water the signs say all over and water used to be included as something that was “free”, but it was really just part of the taxes and now they’re saying, well, they’re going to meter every house and charge people for water and water is pretty abundant around here. That’s certainty not the same as the Pacific Southwest in the United States. California, etc, is going through a huge drought and…

Ross:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we could dedicate a whole show to the water taxing in of itself. It’s a hugely controversial issue. It was all around management in the way that it was brought it. I think the majority of the population recognized that water needs to be paid for at some point in time, but the challenge being is has it already been paid for and the money has been missed managed or in fact is it a human right, which is a whole other conversation. Another tax is the property tax, which is another quite controversial one where Irish people feel an inherit right to own their own land and the ability to do that.

Jason:

By the way, that’s an interesting point you bring up and I know you’ve heard me say this, Ross, on prior episodes, but you know, people in most countries never really own their land. They never really own their property because they have a perpetual lean on it from property taxes. So, tell us what’s going on with property taxes in Ireland? I mean, do you have property taxes?

Ross:

Yes, we do and that’s just come in as of just about two years ago now at this point in time. So, effectively when we got EU money, the counsel sat down and said, okay, guys, we need to reform your economy and here’s some areas where we can raise additional revenue and that was one that stood out in a big way. So, yes, we do, it’s a very low rate and it’s branded based on the valuation of your house, which is government valuation, it’s not an actual market valuation.

What I love about it, tongue and cheek, is the fact that if they get the valuation wrong and you need to go an value your house, you have to pay for that. It’s not tax deductible and you have to pay the different. If you even decide never to pay your taxes, there’s a lean on that property when you come to sell it via, you know, your lawyer’s solicitor, as we would call it. So, yeah, to your point, that’s exactly correct, they win in the through legislation, I’m afraid.

Jason:

They always do, they always do. Well, okay, so yesterday you had a couple of big votes here and it’s amazing how political it is. I mean, everybody is talking about these two things and one was same-sex marriage and what’s different about this and why I wanted to ask you about it is because Ireland is doing this much differently than other countries have.

So, this is a big issue around the world now. We’ve all heard about it, read about it, maybe have been engaged in the issue, but the other one that is just like, laughable is this, the age of the president of the country, right, and currently it’s 35, but you have this referendum to lower it to age 21.

Ross:

That’s correct, yeah.

Jason:

You can imagine a 21 year old president? That’s, to me, that is is just insanity, but okay.

Ross:

Yeah. I mean, that side of it got hidden from the other agenda and it was, it’s quite traditional, it’s quite common to have two referendum points put into one to save on costs and logistics, obviously, but the proposition put before the people is to lower it from 35 to 21, which early doors still, but looking like it’ll be defeated.

Jason:

Now, what’s different about the way you’ve addressed the same sex marriage issue here, because, I don’t know, the tour operator yesterday said to us that it’s the first country that is doing it by popular vote and you have to change your constitution, because, literally, 20 years ago, it was illegal.

Ross:

You have to understand that the Ireland is..

Jason:

Not the marriage issue, homosexuality in general.

Ross:

Well, homosexuality was only made legal in this country in 1993 and divorce in fact was only made legal in 97, I believe was the first divorce.

Jason:

Divorce was illegal here until 97?

Ross:

You couldn’t get divorced, so you were stuck in a big way if things didn’t go to plan.

Jason:

Wow.

Ross:

I could literally speak to you all day on each of these individual issues.

Jason:

That is crazy. I mean, there was no divorce here.

Ross:

Correct.

Jason:

So, 1997. I had no idea. That is mind boggling. Okay.

Ross:

Sure, absolutely. So, the constitution in Ireland were relatively young country in Western Europe and as a republic we’re less than 100 years old, so everything is ingrained into the constitution. The laws on top of that and the definition of marriage is defined between a man and a woman in the constitution and our constitution takes a referendum to get changed and the wording of that was to be changed between people as opposed to between a man and a woman.

So, yes, we had legislated five years ago for, what we call, civil partnership, but it’s not marriage in the same sense and that word is what hinged; between a man and a woman; is what hinged this referendum and we’re often holding up EU legislation, because our constitution requires a change and they’ve been two instances of that in the last decade where we were the only country holding EU legislation, because it was conflicting with our constitution..

Jason:

How does that work? What do you mean by that? The European Union..

Ross:

So, our constitution can support the European legislation effectively, yeah.

Jason:

So, what happens then?

Ross:

So..

Jason:

See, I don’t know, I’m just not as, probably have known from other episodes, I’m just not real bullish on the EU concept, because you got these successful countries like Ireland, like Germany, you know, the other more successful countries taking care of and being responsible for the less successful countries and they’re using the same currency. I mean, that is a mess. I just don’t know how you can do that.

Ross:

Without a banking union and that was another issue we had during the bailout and the difficulties we either had, because actually what happened was our government stepped in and said we’ll back the banks, we’ll guarantee you, so they didn’t have enough liquidity to support the amount of people who were going to take withdrawals from the banks given the property market collapse here in a massive way.

So, we have this single currency, but actually the European union can’t step in and back that bank, so the government had to step in. Actually, the government hadn’t got the funds to support the banking system, which is hence why we needed a bail out from the IMF and the EU. So, you have these two conflicting ideas.

At the end of the day, it’s just history and Europe has this sort of melting pot of different cultures spread across this geographic area with different languages and it spans a lot from World War 2 and the implications of that and making sure that France and Germany never go to war again and the like, but yes, you have a lot of independent ideas and thinking and certainty no body ever agrees on tax, right, the European Union, and that’s a massive form of conflict if you will.

Jason:

I want to get to that, but let’s make sure we get to real estate, okay, but anyway, go ahead.

Ross:

So, no, I mean. That’s effectively it. We have built our economy on a low tax basis for companies wanting to come here. It’s been, very, very, successful. It has worked very, very well for us as a country, because it’s what we have to play with right, it’s the cards that have been dealt and it’s created massive employment for us. The issue you have with that is you’re very, very exposed to global trends as a result of that. We don’t have necessarily massive natural resources to speak of, although have oil off the West Coast.

So, that’s what we’re relying upon and unfortunately having lost the ability to control our interesting rates, put us in a very exposed position and in respect to real estate and property what has happened is our obsession with that has really been our own demise meaning that because we were so reliant upon it, when we saw a dip we felt the pain more over than anybody else. We’re still in negative equity situations around the country.

The good news is the economy is growing. We’re up at 5%. We’re the fastest growing economy in Europe. So, the flip side of that is, yes, we may feel that global trend quite quickly, but we can also recover quite quickly from that perspective and the construction industry has definitely taken a hit, but you’re seeing tech in particular take that revival by the reigns, if you like.

Jason:

Oh yeah, no question about it. So, what is going on with the real estate market here? I mean, prices, of course you had a boom, then you had a bust, now you’re back on the recovery road. It’s funny how people consider that, you’ve heard me say that on prior episodes, the “good” market is considered the one where the prices are going up and the bad markets are consider the one that’s going down. I don’t really view it that way, but that’s the way most people view it. So, what’s going on, where is the trend, just tell us what it looks like, and then let’s talk about your interest in US real estate.

Ross:

Sure, I think what. It’s a massive topic obviously, but to try summarize it, you really need to understand the Irish psyche and their obsession with it. Their chat in the pubs over how much their own property is worth, the square of land they have was paid for five years ago at X and now it’s worth 5x and that was a common conversation that happened during the boom times. In fact, people would buy houses overseas and the banks were writing to people and say, hey, your overdraft is only ten grand, here’s 50, go spend it. And when you bought a house, did you want a Range Rover with that? That was kind of the conversation that was happening.

Jason:

Wow, yeah.

Ross:

No, no. It’s true and it was a fundamental issue of supply and demand. You also have to understand back in those days from sort of 2000-2008, people were coming here from Spain, from Italy, from France, from Germany, because US multinationals were setting up in Ireland. They were using it as a base to sell into Europe and they needed language skills. People in those countries couldn’t get jobs and the world of Ireland as a platform spread and it spread like wildfire.

So, people came here in their robes and there was this massive demand for places to live and suddenly people in Europe – now this is a big generalization, but they were people needing to rent places, so people were buying and putting money into them and renting them out and were absolutely doing and having conversations around capital appreciation as oppose to income based asset class.

Jason:

I’m so glad you said that, because that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you. In any market that becomes this frothy, bubbly, speculative market, like you had here and like you have here now and then.

Ross:

Speculation is exactly what it was.

Jason:

Yeah, speculation. You never have good income, never have good rent to value ratios. So, tell us about two or three bedroom property here. Just describe sort of your middle of the road property here and how much that costs and so forth and this I assume will all be in Euro. So, the Euro here I think is about 110, I was going to say 112. The Euro is down quite a bit, which makes it a little nicer for us to travel, but..

Ross:

You bought coffee today, appreciate that. It’s easier for you today.

Jason:

It’s easier today, but I tell ya, it’s still not as inexpensive as the US. I can even be in an expensive city in the US and I think that it is still less expensive than traveling around Europe, even now with the Euro now vice versa the dollar. Okay, go ahead. And I think that’s because of the other discussion we had earlier about this sort of socialism that just pervades the European psyche and how it just makes everything more expensive, but that’s kind of another discussion.

Ross:

Another show could be dedicated to that topic on its own, absolutely, yeah.

Jason:

We could dedicate a whole 100-200 episodes to that topic.

Ross:

Yeah, so I guess to answer your question around what we would call three bed semi-detached home, which is around about say 1000-1200 square feet, you would be looking at, back in the day, purchasing that for about $350,000 Euro in let’s call it, say, 04, but the time 07-08 rolled around, that would have been about $620,000, depending on the area..

Jason:

So, it was $320,000 did you say?

Ross:

$350.

Jason:

$350,000 and it went up to $620,000 Euro. So, at little bit more than the dollar and back then a lot more, because the Euro back that was probably a 139 or something. Now, what is the price of that same property?

Ross:

You’d be looking at about $380 to $420, depending on the area again. A lot of the issue around negative equity was the fact that banks were throwing money at people. 100% mortgage was common place and interest only period on a residential property could have been three years. In fact, in some cases ten years if you structured it around your pension.

Jason:

On interest only, but what was the overall length of that loan. It started to amortize after that I assume.

Ross:

So, back in the 90s when my parents would have bought a home, that we would have lived in, the mortgage was always 20 years end of story. Back then moved up to 25 to 30 to 35 and at the height of the Celtic Tiger before it all collapsed, you could get a 40 year mortgage.

Jason:

Wow, yeah. We saw that same stuff in the US too and in Japan and the US they talked about 100 year mortgages.

Ross:

I’ve heard that story, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Jason:

I don’t know if those ever actually happened, but I know in the US you could do a 40 year mortgage, which is interesting. And how much did you have to put down? Zero?

Ross:

So, 100% mortgage was zero. You just had your closing costs in terms of the legality around that and there was also a thing around stamp duty and stamp duty was quite significant. So, you could pay up to, I believe at the time, between 6-8% depending if it was your first or second home that you bought and if that was the second hand dwelling that’s where that money came in. What the government was trying to do back then was incentivize people to buy first time, you know, newly built apartment complexes that the government had also further subsidized under a thing called section 28 where..

Jason:

Which is making development really desirable, right?

Ross:

Yeah, absolutely, but what they did was they didn’t sit down and say how many property does the country actually need. They said, well, how many can we build. So, let’s do that.

Jason:

We did the same thing in the US, right, it just got so frothy and stupid.

Ross:

So, suddenly you got all these properties springing up in places that people don’t want to live and they won’t ever want to live with these inflated values and people were buying them thinking, I will just throw a tenant in their, it’ll be fine.

Jason:

Yeah, but there was no tenant. The tenant didn’t exist.

Ross:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jason:

That’s the something that happened, by the way, it was pronounced in Central Florida. In some of these areas where, even now, those markets still really haven’t recovered. They were just building, building everything and it made no sense. It was crazy. So, you had the same exact phenomenon here.

Ross:

Absolutely and I think we got particularly obsessed with it, because we saw it as the never ending gravy train, that it would always perform for us and negative equity was not something we’d ever experienced in this country.

Jason:

That’s the way it is, you know, in the context of these environments where you have these bubbles, it seems like very few people ever really see it, because it’s so powerful, like you said, all the conversations at every pub are how my house went up in value by three-four-five times and everybody that will just keep going on forever. It’s very hard to comprehend how that can really change, you know?

Ross:

No, absolutely and people really got obsessed with it and we were having discussions around sort of the period of 2008 to 2010 around this idea of a soft landing and how, oh, it won’t be that pronounced here and actually, you know, yes, I think it’ll go down, but you know, it won’t be two bad. People started talking about how the Euro and the dollar, the exchange rate might slide and how it could become more expensive to do business here and these kind of conundrums or scenarios were played out.

The reality is that I suppose construction took a big hit and that’s where a lot of pains were felt whether you were a construction worker, although, I don’t think anyone has a lot of sympathy for developers, because they brought down the banks and there’s a lot of controversy over that as well, but we were looking down the barrel at 13% unemployment back in those days.

Now, we’ve just announced its dropped below 10%, which is a great thing and as I say the economy is growing 5%, so we’re getting out of it. We are very much the poster child for Europe and we’re seen as the good boys if you like, we’ve done anything that’s been asked of us almost. We pushed back..

Jason:

In terms of the EU, right?

Ross:

Yeah, right. In terms of what they pushed back or what they mandated. Now, we did push back on a lot of items and said, no, we’re not prepared to do that and our corporation tax rate was an untouchable, but things like the other things we’ve touched on earlier like property taxes, water taxes, an increase in the VAT sales tax rate, an increase in income tax, which is now disguised as this USC charge, which is actually just a stealth tax that’s branded cleverly into your pay, which generates four billion Euro for the  government coffers every single year and you can turn that tap on, but good luck turning it off again.

Jason:

That’s one of your great sayings from the day. Once you turn on the tap, it’s very difficult to turn it off and that’s how every government program goes. We see that all over the year. It’s just a big phenomenon. Tell us about your interest in real estate personally and you started listening to my show, back, what, six years ago. That’s a long time you’ve been a listener. Thank you for listening, by the way.

Ross:

It was just good content that I very much gravitated towards. It made an awful lot of sense. Very much speaks to the Robert Kiyosaki mantra. I know you’ve had him on your show about this idea of cash flowing your assets and I think that given the right mortgage environment and given somebody’s actually looking at it an investment on its merits in of itself, rather than, you know, what job you have necessarily, how you can support that, all that sort of stuff, it’s about the demographics and it’s about running numbers and doing your home work and I think this market certainty would have lent itself to that back in the hay day very foolish, but I think your mortgage market is a little bit more open to that concept and idea and given the right scenario you can do that a lot more easily. You’ve got to understand, you are in an economy of 15 trillion right now and 300 million people, etc. So, that market competitiveness creates a different land scape.

Jason:

Oh, sure does, sure does and the fact that we’ve got so many really different markets, because it’s such a big geography, you know, the US. 400 local markets, so it’s a lot different, but it’s a lot less expensive than it is here or really anywhere in Europe and I don’t know if you heard when I was in Croatia just last week my rant foreign real estate and how I said first tier European cities, second tier European city, even a third tier European city, and I know there’s a bit of a fuzziness as to what those tiers mean. They mean something a little different to everybody, how you couldn’t make the numbers work. So, let’s just test my theory and I want you to attest that we have not discuss this, okay, what we’re about to say.

Ross:

Correct.

Jason:

And so test my theory. You talked about a property that is now $380 to $420,000 Euro to buy it and I’m just going to take a wild guess here, maybe I’ll be totally wrong live here. I’m going to say that that property will rent for $1,800 to $2,000 Euro per month, right?

Ross:

That’s dead on, yeah. That is dead on, yep.

Jason:

Isn’t that amazing those ratios hold up all around the world and so if you could buy a $100,000 Euro property here. I bet you it could rent it for $1,000 Euro per month.

Ross:

I think you would – well, you probably would in the right areas. The challenge is getting a property for that price and there were a few ones to be picked up during the bust time when the economy took a nose dive. There was a government organization called NAMA, which is a bit like your TARP program where the government stepped in as the only buyer in the market and said, we’ll have all of this to protect, supposedly the market we all know what government intervention can mean.

In any case, their idea was to drip feed the market, but there were bargains to be had when certainty places needed to be sold and there were a few I wished I had gotten my hands on, unfortunately.

Jason:

Everybody’s got that story.

Ross:

Yeah, exactly, but you could pick them up for a lower price. It’s much more difficult to do that today. I’ve looked at real estate in the UK and there are opportunities there and I think their mortgage market is a little bit more open to that happening, plus they’ve got a bigger economy.

Jason:

But the UK is too expensive. You just can’t do it there either, I mean.

Ross:

I wouldn’t touch London, I wouldn’t touch the M25, but there are smaller cities around the coast that do support the type of cash flow you would want to get out of it.

Jason:

Very interesting. So, just give the listeners a little background as we wrap up here, Ross. You went to college in Australia right, but you grew up here in Dublin, and then you went to college in Australia. What did you study?

Ross:

I did a masters in international business and marketing.

Jason:

Okay, so you did your masters there and did you do undergrad here in Dublin.

Ross:

That’s right. I did technology, computer science at Trinity college.

Jason:

Do you want to mention the company you recently worked for and what you’re doing now or anything like that?

Ross:

Yeah. It was a great company to work for. I worked there for the last two years. So, I won’t mention the name, but it was a pre-IPO startup with a very kind of dynamic culture and I think..

Jason:

A pretty big pre-IPO startup. I don’t know if I’d say if it was a startup anymore.

Ross:

No, no. They were certainty well-funded and myself and my wife have been involved in the US tech scene here in this country for a decade now at this point in time, so it’s a very fluid and a dynamic place to be and constantly changing. I guess, yeah, certainty exciting.

Jason:

Yeah, good stuff. So, now you’re doing our own startup, right?

Ross:

That’s right, yeah. I am running my own digital marketing agency, which is been on the sidelines for the last two years. Now it’s a matter of getting stuck into it and taking it to the next level. So, exciting, but you know, hesitation is in there as well.

Jason:

Yeah. Well, good luck to you and thank you so much for being on the show and telling us about this market. You are very, very knowledgeable and it’s just amazing the number of topics that we covered at coffee over an hour and then here just talking on the show. Anything else you’d like the listeners to know? You know, any part of your personal story or economics or real estate investing? Just as we wrap up.

Ross:

No, I think there’s plenty of opportunity out there for me and I think you just need to do your home work. Put in the hard work and effort. Keep trying, never give up, and that’s always been certainly my philosophy in life and I think if you can stick true to that, I think you’ll come out the other end in decent shape.

Jason:

Awesome. Ross Lauder, thank you so much for joining us today and happy investing to you and listeners, go check out JasonHartman.com. We’ve got some great properties on there. Also, we’re going to be announcing, hopefully soon, another property tour. We’re just working that out right now. So, just gonna tease you with not telling you where, but we are working out the details on that now. So, look forward to future announcements on that and thank you so much for listening. I’m on my way back to London here in just two hours and then just on my way back home tomorrow. So, by the time you hear this show. I will be back in Arizona. We’ll talk to you soon. Happy investing to everybody.

Announcer:

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor Network Inc. exclusively.