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Trent Werner: Welcome back to another episode of the Deal Deep Dive segment on the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Werner. In this segment, our featured guests will share their unique stories on a specific deal they've invested in. We'll dive deep into finding the deal, financing the deal, writing an offer, and the due diligence. Do us a solid and smash that subscribe button, leave us a rating, and share this episode.
And now let's dive deep. Welcome back to the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Werner. On today's episode, we're joined by Ann Michelle Ward with the Passive Profit Partners. Ann Michelle is gonna share her story on how she started real estate career in Colorado as a broker, as an investor, as a fix and flipper, and owned two different businesses prior to moving to Panama full time and becoming a real estate investor in Panama.
Now that she's retired, she builds spec homes, one a year, and she has a new project of a 55 and over community in Panama, and it'll be the first of their type. Now let's welcome Ann Michelle Ward. Alright. Ann Michelle Juan joining the Westside Investors Network podcast today. Ann Michelle, thank you so much for chatting with me all the way from well, I'll let you tell me tell us where you're from or where you're where you're sitting at right now.
Anne-Michelle Wand: I'm sitting at Bocas Del Toro, Panama in the in a little I work from home, and it's a cottage on the Caribbean Ocean.
Trent Werner: I can confidently say that you are the first guest to be on the show from Panama, which is a very big honor for you, and I'm very jealous because it's 31 degrees and raining here. So welcome to the show, Ann Michelle.
Anne-Michelle Wand: Thank you. It's an honor to be here, and I planned it that way. I don't wanna see snow ever again.
Trent Werner: Well, I'm excited for this conversation primarily because Ann Michelle has experience in so many different, I guess, niches or or facets of the real estate industry. Ann Michelle, I know you invest now and you've invested for a long time. Have you always been an investor, or were you doing something else in real estate prior to really focusing on the investment side of the business?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Well, one of my philosophies has always been that I could combine business with pleasure. And you know how people say, if you buy a home, it's not an investment. And if you do an investment, you know, it's a different criteria. I've always wanted to combine those two, and I did it on my very first real estate investment where I found a property in the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado where I used to live. And it was on what we call excess land at the edge of the city but wasn't in the city.
So I found out that you could annex to the city, hook up to the city's sewer and water services, and as a result, divide it into four quarter acre lots. So that's exactly what I did. I annexed to the city, hooked up to the services, subdivided the land, lived in the house for five years, and sold the three lots. With the proceeds, I was able to pay I I had borrowed the down payment. I didn't have the down payment for the house.
I borrowed it, and I was able to pay it back out of the proceeds and buy two more properties to do exactly the same thing. After that, I was hooked on real estate investing, and I continued trying different venues, taking classes from mentors and investing in fix and flips and single family homes and ten thirty one ing into bigger properties.
Trent Werner: I love it. And and we talked a little bit before we started recording. You you owned a real estate brokerage franchise. Were you already owning that, or did you already own that while you did this first deal, or did that come later?
Anne-Michelle Wand: No. At that time, when I did that, I I had just gotten my real estate license, and I was just an agent for another company. And but I eventually did open my own business in Colorado. And when I moved to Panama, and that was even though I invested in Panama earlier, we moved full time in 02/2010. That's when I opened the United Country franchise in Bocas Del Toro.
Trent Werner: Got it. Okay. One thing one thing that I I actually love about what you just told me in using real estate as a a tool while you're in the business is something that I think a lot of brokers and agents maybe forget about or or don't even think about when they get into the business. A lot of people get in the business, and they they wanna just sell houses because that's what, you know, the the real estate industry is about. And myself included, when I got in the business, my first partner, you know, had been in it for thirty years or something like that, and all he focused on was selling houses.
And I I knew I didn't wanna do that. And I wanted to use real estate as an investment vehicle, as a business, in addition to, you know, working with clients and helping other people, achieve their goals. What what what made you wanna do the same thing of getting into real estate and helping other people, but also using it as an investment tool for yourself and your financial success?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Well, what I realized about real estate was that it was a vehicle to create a retirement account that I could perhaps retire early, which is exactly what I did when using it. I had another business. Prior to becoming an agent, I owned two successful salons. And I was getting very good income from those, but I knew that my retirement account would be funded by something else because no one was gonna give me a four zero one k. I was self employed.
Right? So I I used real estate as a vehicle to create a retirement account, to to educate my children, send them through college. I was a single mom.
Trent Werner: Yeah. And that's I mean, I love what you said there because, you know, I I don't have a a traditional 401K through a W2 two employer, but my wife does. And, you know, every time she sees that, she complains how small it is. But we look at our real estate portfolio, and it's it's quite a bit more than what the four zero one k from her employer is. And I think she understands and I understand, the power of real estate investing and how this tool can be used for us down the road in terms of retirement.
So, Ann Michelle, why did you move to Panama?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Well, I had this dream about living on the Caribbean Ocean from the time I was a teenager. I loved to travel. I had a wanderlust, and I didn't know I was gonna end up in Panama, but that's where I ended up. I I would travel to exotic beaches, and I went to Thailand, and I went to Hawaii, and I went to, a lot of other Caribbean islands, went to Costa Rica, started traveling Central America. But because of my kind of sense of where the opportunity lies when I got to Panama, it was I I could smell the the boom coming in the emerging market here, and I said, I gotta invest here, and maybe I wanna move here.
And that's what ended up happening because I came to really you know, it grew on me every time I I started taking vacations just here. And I bought property in 1999 before the market really opened up. But I didn't really do anything with it for years because I was just going back and managing my businesses in Colorado and then coming down here for vacations. So
Trent Werner: And and I guess was there was there one thing or a few things that, I guess attracted you or or or or made you realize that it was an emerging market kinda early on?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Oh, yes. When when I did my research, I found out that they offered that the government was behind gathering investors here and people who wanted to move here just as expats as well, as well as foster tourism. So they were into improving the infrastructure. They made different laws that made it easy for people to invest here. You don't have to be a resident or live here to invest here.
You have the same rights as anybody as any Panamanian. They have title property. You own it fee simple. There's a stable government, and and this pretty stable economy because of the canal, the 2,600,000,000.0 coming in a year. They they they have a variety of, visas.
If you do wanna live here like I did, you can become a resident and not a citizen, but a permanent resident. And they have about six different kinds of visas you can do that, including investor, agricultural, pension auto, if you just wanna retire, Friendly Nations, if you wanna have a business. That's the one that I got was the Friendly Nations, Visa and was allowed me to to start the business that I had here. There's there's a lot. It's friendly.
The people are friendly and helpful. You can you don't have to learn Spanish even though Spanish is the primary language. A lot of people speak English. They use the American dollar, so there's no currency transmission. I'll probably think of some other things while we're talking
Trent Werner: because this
Anne-Michelle Wand: is just a laundry list.
Trent Werner: Well, I'm I'm I'm very curious because, like I said, we haven't I haven't had anyone on this on this show that has lived abroad, that has left The United States to to go, you know, explore and and put boots and roots in a different country and and thrive that way. Right? So when you I mean, you explained how you were, you know, kind of drawn to Panama after your travels and and saw that this market was emerging. When you got down there to start this brokerage, I guess, where, what was your r and d going into it, or or, you know, how did that differ from your you know, the brokers that you worked for in Colorado, your businesses in Colorado to, you know, opening up a business in real estate in Panama being from The United States. But did you have to do any r and d or or were anything or anything's different when you got down there for the business?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Well, I, you know, came down here with my partner, and we would come down for longer and longer periods of time each time we vacationed, and eventually, it blossomed into living here full time. So during those trips, we did some natural we made contacts with people here. I knew that there was only three real estate companies, and they were all local. So I could see that bringing a global company, a global franchise would benefit the community and benefit me. And that's exactly what I did because I don't know if you've heard of United Country.
It's a global company that's based out of Kansas City, and they were very it it's it's for rural areas, so they're not in bigger cities. They're more in the outskirts areas. And it was so it was perfect for me. And I was friends with everybody here already. So when I opened the franchise, it is funny, but one of the other agents loaned me six of his listings to get started because it didn't have any listings because friendly competition.
It's a little bit different than doing it in The States because I know we have mostly exclusive listings, and it's the opposite here. It's probably at least 50% what we call open listings, where anybody can sell the property and list it on their website. And some but there are some exclusives and that concept has been growing as well. I already knew how to run a business having had my salons and another real estate company in United States. I had already bought property here when I you know, the first year that I came down and I was I built a little office for myself.
The first one was on the street because because I wanted the visibility, and then I moved it for because the property that I bought was on the ocean. I moved I said, well, I wanna have an ocean view while I'm working and so do my clients, so I moved the bill I I built another building in on the front of the lot that faced the ocean, and then I rented out the old office and, moved up to the new one and operated from there where you could look at the the ocean through the windows or open the double doors out to the sea, and my clients just loved it. They would come up and we'd sit there, and they dream about their second home or their investment property or, you know, whatever they were thinking for their dream home.
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Anne-Michelle Wand: Make sense?
Trent Werner: I would I would be your client if if, I got to look at the ocean while we're talking business. So, Ann Michelle, we talked about your business. Now I wanna hear about your investing career. I know you you said you flipped houses and you had your other businesses, but I really wanna dive into the the Panamanian investment career that you've had and the successes that you've had. What have you invested in, I guess, and what, I guess, types of projects were you focused on or are you focused on in Panama, you know, in the last couple of years?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Okay. Well, since I came here when when I first came here, I bought the commercial piece of property in the town of Bocas Del Toro. That made sense, and that's a story in itself where my girlfriend and I were here on vacation, and she wanted to go in the grocery store to buy something, and I didn't wanna go into the air conditioning, so I waited on the street. And while I was waiting on the street, this guy came down the street and said, do you know where I can sell a house here? Because, again, there were only a few real estate companies.
And I asked him, well, what kind of property do you have? And he kind of points over to the ocean. So I said, if you wait a minute for my girlfriend to come out, you can take us over there. We might know somebody. And I knew it was gonna be us, but I didn't say that at that time.
So she came out. We went over to the property, and it was a a the city lots here are 10 by 20 meters, which is 30 by 60 feet. And it looked out over the Caribbean Ocean on the bay, and it was a there was a crumbling down cement house on it and two palm trees. And we asked him the price of it, and he said, like, something incredible that we, you know, we couldn't even believe. And we said if your paperwork pans out, you know, we'll have our lawyer look at the paperwork.
And if it does come out good, we'll buy the property. We made a verbal agreement right there, and that's how I got my first property. The second property that I bought here was a year later. And since I lived in Colorado and had the mountains at my doorstep and even lived in the mountains for a while above Boulder, I really didn't want any part of the mountains in Panama even though I'd heard they were beautiful. But friends who lived there and went there convinced me that I should at least make a trip up there to see this this beauty because Panama is a stunningly beautiful country with everything but snow.
They have mountains that look like the Rocky Mountains, but tropical foliage. We have the Caribbean Ocean on the North Side and the Pacific Ocean on the South Side. So I did go up to a place called Boquete, which is 3,500 feet above sea level, and it's eternal spring there, 75, 65 to 75 degrees year round. And I went to this development that this guy actually from Reckerdidge, Colorado had bought an 80 acre coffee farm. And he was developing they was just plaiting the roads and the and the lots in this coffee farm to create a gated community with a river and a golf course.
And, again, the prices were so spectacular, especially right at the beginning there when he just was planning the roads that I couldn't resist. You know, I had just sold a property in Colorado, and I had funds. So I I ended up buying a villa on the third hole of a golf course for an incredible price, and they built it wasn't built yet. They built it for you. So a year later, that villa was finished, and we enjoyed going back and forth from Bocas to Boquete whenever we wanted at whim when we were here.
By this time, we were sent spending, like, six months in Colorado and six months in Bocas. In about three of those, we'd go to the mountains and three, we'd spend down on the ocean. So in 02/2010, I decided that I wanted so 02/2001 to 02/2010, we owned the villa. And in 02/2010, decided to focus efforts in Bocas Del Toro and sold the villa up there at a nice profit. That's when I built my office.
That's when I started building my home on other land. I had also bought a separate piece of land that was on another island because there are nine islands here that are inhabited and thousands of small uninhabited islands. Now this island that I chose to buy property on was called Solarte, Island Of The Sun, and it's a 600 acre island with just a few homes, especially at the time, on it. And I didn't do anything with the land right away, but when we got funds both from selling the Boquete house and from selling another property in Colorado, we started building our personal home on that land. So that those were my previous investments.
And then as I said, I operated the franchise for ten years. And in the last three years, I've built and sold three spec homes. You know, having had a good eye on the market of what was needed, I noticed a gap between 5,250,000 of shortage of homes for people to buy. That's what my clients were asking for, and there wasn't enough of them. So that's what I decided to build in retirement, and I I had purchased two lots on a little bay on another island called.
And I built a home on one of them. And then the neighbor said, oh, my husband just died. Will you buy my house too? And so we we bought her house and tore it down and built another one right next door to it, and both of those sold, like, 20 in 2022. And then I purchased another piece of land on the main island of Isla Colon, which is where the airport is, and began building my third spec home there on a desirable location that faced the ocean.
I try to stick to titled property that face it that faces the ocean, whether it's, just ocean view or ocean front. And that third one, like I was telling you before we got on here, I built it. It took me about ten months to build it and had it on the market the last three months and just got it under contract last week.
Trent Werner: Very nice.
Anne-Michelle Wand: So my new plans yes. Yes. I'm I'm very happy about that. My new plans with the proceeds from this property was to go into multifamily here in Vocus because, again, there's a shortage of that type of housing here. There's individual houses, there's bed and breakfasts, there's even some small apartment buildings, but there's no real communities.
And so I decided to build an over 55 community with amenities for people that wanted to already here or wanted to move from Canada or The United States and live with a little extra luxury of having the types of amenities you get in over five fifty five communities.
Trent Werner: So what is what does a project like that entail when you're talking about an over 55 community? I mean, I've seen them in Arizona and in California and those kind of things. But Mhmm. What does it entail to actually, I guess, build that from from dirt to the finished product? And and where do you, I guess, where are you at currently with that, and where are you wanting to be here in the next twelve months with that project?
Anne-Michelle Wand: That's a good question. Where I'm at is I've located a piece of land that's three and a half acres that is on the main island. I wanted it to be on the main island because I wanted proximity to the hospital. We have a hospital on that island. And I I've found through my networking a couple that owned three and a half acres on that road, and they are willing to joint venture.
So now we're in the process of designing and getting permits to build on that land, and it's gonna be somewhere between it's small, between, like, 25 to 35 units on that property. And I still need to raise the the money to do that. And it's figured it's gonna cost 6 or $7,000,000 by the time it's all said and done. It'll probably take one and a half to two years to build it. It'll probably get take six months to get the permitting and things in place.
And I planned I decided after this last house that I built, which was stick built, to to seek out more sustainable modular type homes. And there are now some practitioners in Panama that provide that kind of thing where they prebuild the panels like a sort of like a SIPs panel, and they load them flat on trucks, and they already have electricity, and they already have plumbing in them, and you order the roof size and all that stuff, and they ship it on a truck over, and then you've got your foundations built. And it's you're so I may be able to build it quicker than my other buildings just because of that, even though it is, a bigger project. Since I haven't done this type of project before, I'm not really sure, but I'm confident that I can do it and will do it.
Trent Werner: How does that how does that affect cost per cost per door or cost per unit when you're going from stick built to a modular system like that? Do you does it I mean, have you gotten that far? Do you know what it does with the cost per door?
Anne-Michelle Wand: I haven't really I haven't really gotten that far. I've got a a projection of what I think it's going to be based on what I've built before. And I think some things are gonna be less expensive because it is a modular unit, but other things might be more expensive like the green septics that we're gonna buy. And I wanna incorporate solar and, you know, lots of green features and sustainability there. So it remains to be seen the exact costs and but I'm I'm confident that we can do it within a budget that will cash flow really well for investors and benefit the community.
For me, it's much more than about ROI at this point in my life. I have to see it benefit people on multilevels, you know, so it will benefit businesses, you know, bringing business into the communities to provide services for those people, benefit the residents to have a safe, clean, innovative place to thrive. It'll benefit give people jobs, it'll ripple out to the to the entire community, and it'll provide the investors with significant ROI over the long term. And I have an exit plan for, once it where we wanna build it with cash and then pull the money out when it's optimized around year five, and get 50% bank financing, which is lowers the risk and still provides cash flow.
Trent Werner: So this this is build to rent then, not not build to sell?
Anne-Michelle Wand: There might be parts of it that are build to sell, but I think it's gonna be more built to rent.
Trent Werner: Okay. Okay. And then so you said, you know, the plan is to refi or cash out refi after year five. Do you have a projected hold time for the entirety of the project, or is it indefinite?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Excuse me. I I didn't catch that.
Trent Werner: So, you have a plan to
Anne-Michelle Wand: What was the question?
Trent Werner: You have a plan to refi and pull capital out Refi. In in year five. But do you have a a long term hold plan, or is that indefinite to fully offload it and dispose of the property down the road?
Anne-Michelle Wand: I think that's gonna be up to the investors. I'll talk with everybody who's invested in year five and who they can decide whether they wanna just enjoy cash flow for another five years or if they wanna sell at that point. You know?
Trent Werner: Got it.
Anne-Michelle Wand: Because we won't I I plan to be able to return all the investors' money by by year five or six depending how long the financing takes to get done. And here, it it takes much longer to get financing than it does in The United States. Instead of, like, a couple of months, it takes eight or ten months to to get financing done. So and we don't have mortgage brokers. You have to go through your local bank, and and it's just I have a a long established relationship with my bank, so it should work out.
Trent Werner: The the last question I have for you on this is, you know, what if you were talking with someone that has never invested in an emerging market or out of United States for that matter in real estate, what would you tell them are the benefits, and and I guess the the good differences between investing in The United States and investing in a market like Panama?
Anne-Michelle Wand: I would say, you know, if you have an adventurous soul and you wanna venture outside your home country, it's worth the leap. You know, it diversifies your investments even more. You know, we think we're diversified when you have more than one property, but not really. You think you're diversified even when you have properties in different states and you are, but there's more. And so this just adds an additional layer of protection diversifying your portfolio outside The United States, especially in this uncertain economy with we don't know what's happening in The US these days.
Trent Werner: Very nice. I agree with you.
Anne-Michelle Wand: Do you agree?
Trent Werner: I agree with you. Yes. There diversification is one thing. And I was actually talking with someone the other day, and, you know, we were talking about so many people invest in the Sun Belt or the East Coast, West Coast, whatever it may be. And, you know, investing all your eggs in the same location or same part of the country is is not diversification.
You know? You wanna spread it out across the country. But to another level, now we're talking about outside of the country and diversifying into emerging markets and other established countries, which was something that we didn't talk about when I had that conversation. So I appreciate you, you know, making me aware of the other types of diversification that can be out there in real estate investing itself.
Anne-Michelle Wand: Absolutely. I just think a portion of your portfolio should add to your diversification, and that creates safety in on another level.
Trent Werner: Absolutely. And, Michelle, where can people hear more from you or learn more from you?
Anne-Michelle Wand: Well, I do provide consulting for people that wanna relocate or invest outside the country. And you can I have a profile on LinkedIn, you know, Anne Michelle Wand, and my page is Passive Profit Partners, which is the name of my company that I've formed for this investment? You can also I also have a website that explains, in broad terms the investments that I'm doing. I call the 55 community active agers because we want people to thrive, not just survive. And that is www.passiveprofitpartners.com.
So those two ways you should be able to find my email and my phone number and everything displayed there.
Trent Werner: Very nice. And, Michelle, thank you so much for sharing your story and how beneficial and, rewarding and exciting investing in other markets can be outside of The United States.
Anne-Michelle Wand: Hey. Really appreciate the opportunity, and meeting you has been wonderful. Thank you.
Intro speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real Estate Professionals Investing podcast on Wynn, your community of investing knowledge for growth. We hope that this episode has increased your knowledge and added value to your path to freedom. If you would, please take a second to rate us so that we can get more great investors to interview. If you or someone that you know wants to be on, please visit westsideinvestors.com and fill out our form to be on the show. Thank you again and enjoy your day.
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