You will rarely know a foreign market the way a local does — and you don’t need to. What you need is a way to reach a decision you can defend from a distance.

Most cross-border mistakes are not made in the numbers. They are made in the impression: a good week in a beautiful city, a headline yield, a confident introduction, and suddenly a thesis has formed without ever being tested. Distance exaggerates this. The less you see day to day, the more weight a single strong impression carries. The discipline, then, is to replace feeling with structure.

The map is not the market

A market is not its skyline or its brochure. It is a structure: what is being built and when, who is allowed to build it, how ownership is held and transferred, who the real buyers and sellers are, and how quickly an asset can be turned back into cash. Two cities that look identical to a visitor can behave in opposite ways once you look at supply pipelines, tenure and the rules that govern exit. Start with the structure, and the postcard stops misleading you.

Build a local proxy, not a local feeling

You cannot acquire a local’s intuition on a schedule, but you can assemble a reliable proxy for it. Registry and transaction data, independent rental and price indices, planning and permit records, and a small circle of on-the-ground professionals whose incentives you actually understand — together these give you most of what the intuition was for. The point is not to know everything a resident knows, but to know the things that would change your decision.

Price the things you cannot see

The risks that hurt cross-border investors are usually the invisible ones. Currency can quietly undo a good operating result. Tax and transaction friction can turn a fair entry price into a poor one. Governance, enforcement and the practical cost of exit rarely appear in the pitch, and always appear in the outcome. Name these risks explicitly and give each a number, even a rough one. A risk you have priced is a risk you can live with; a risk you have ignored is the one that decides the deal for you.

The goal is not to become a local. It is to reach a decision you can defend from a distance.

Decide at the level of the framework

One memorable dinner-table story is not a thesis. When the evidence is thinner than you’d like — as it usually is across borders — resist the urge to lean harder on the anecdote. Lean instead on the method: state what you believe, state what would prove you wrong, and size the decision to how much of that you can actually verify. Done consistently, this is what lets you act in markets you don’t live in without pretending you do.

José Covas

FRICS · Founder & Principal