On 31 Jan 2021, VPF was happy to host the event “Real Estate Investment” exclusively for our registered members, a continuation in our #personal_finance series. We are so pleased that the event went very smoothly with active interactions between the speaker and members in our VPF community.

In the 2-hour event, we invited Ms. Tammy Pham, an ophthalmologist, to share her investment experience in Finland. Despite working in the medical sector, Tammy has earned impressive returns from her real estate investments since the 2010s in the Finnish market. It means that everyone, including you and me, regardless of education background, can start our own real estate investments here in Finland.

Throughout the event and especially during the Q&A session, we received a lot of questions and positive comments in the feedback. Here are the main points that we gather from the informative sharing session.

  1. Be specific in choosing your investment target

Tammy advises us to have specific preference and criteria when making housing purchases. She tends to follow certain requirements when searching for housing in webs (e.g. oikotie.fi), and the three most important characteristics that Tammy personally prioritises are Location, Apartment layout, and Price. 

Especially with the Airbnb business, Tammy has seen great advantages in buying apartments that are near to each other. This strategy allows time and effort saving in daily operations of the business.

  1. Create good contact with bankers

According to Tammy’ experience, it is highly beneficial to create good contact with personal bankers to grab the good deals timely. Based on your record and your negotiation skills, you will have different terms in different loans for your real estate investments.

  1. Establish a legal entity for the Airbnb business

During the event, Tammy advised that you should also establish a legal entity (e.g. limited liability company) for real estatement investment. In this way, all the purchases you made for the apartments as part of the investment are VAT deductible.

  1. Watch out the market

With more than 10 years of experience, Tammy observes that real estate is a highly cyclical market. It means there have been ups and downs, and you better watch out the market and have a careful analysis before making your investment decision. She recommended securing sufficient saving as a safety net to survive the downs.

Feedback:

Overall, we are very happy to see so many positive comments about the content and the helpful sharing from Tammy. 

  • I’m so proud that our Vietnamese community managed to create a very well structured, transparent and great organisation like this. I will highly recommend it to anyone I know 🙂
  • I love this event as the topic is so dynamic and important for my personal and career development.
  • Great team and great vision to improve Vietnamese professionals reputation in Finland

On behalf of the VPF community, we are so thankful for the time as well as the informative sharing from Ms. Tammy Pham. In addition to that, the event content and organisation have been very smooth, largely thanks to our moderators Linh Dang, Loc Nguyen, and Quy Pham, one of the key event coordinators of the VPF family.

VPF is doing our best to bring more interesting speakers to our future events. We are committed to building a strong community of expats in Finland and looking forward to seeing you at our next events!