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Welcome to the Alternative Investments Experimental Blog!

Increase your knowledge about alternative investments!
This blog mainly focus on stock market-alternative investments such as forest investments, land investments, property investments, hedge funds, forex investments, and other interesting ways of making money.

I analyze and buy alternative investments with my own money. This gives you fun reading and a guideline how to invest your own money in alternative investments by following my success and learning from my mistakes! :-)


Saturday, April 27, 2013

Brazilian social housing investment “minha casa, minha vida” - Bosque Residencial


 



 

“With a population now exceeding 200 million, Brazil needs more houses! Lower-income families are facing a housing deficit of 8 million homes, set to grow to over 12 million by 2023. We are helping to solve their problem.”

 
 
This is how the investment prospect starts to describe the investment that I have made recently. The investment is a “social housing investment”, which I have made through Emerald Knight Consultants, an investment broker specializing in Socially Responsible & Sustainable Investments (http://www.emeraldknightconsultants.com/). The issuing company of the investment is EcoHouse Developments, an award winning property developer of social housing programme in Brazil (http://www.ecohousedevelopments.com/). “EcoHouse was founded in June 2009 and are now a global organisation with an annual turnover of 65M and offices in London, England - Natal, Brazil - Toronto, Canada - Dubai, UAE and Singapore. We have an expanding workforce of over 1040 full time employees across the globe which includes over 900 full time buildcrew onsite in Natal, Brazil.”

So what is a social housing?

EcoHouse Developments describes the social housing investment as following:

‘Social housing’ is a term used for homes provided by a government for families with modest incomes. The economy of Brazil has now grown to become the 6th biggest in the world (overtaking the UK at the end of 2011) and is continuing to rise. This means that the demand for housing has of course increased. Property supply simply can’t keep up with demand and added to this millions of families in Brazil already live in sub standard housing. In 2009 the government decided to act decisively to tackle this problem. So the Minha Casa, Minha Vida social housing scheme was launched! The ‘MCMV’ scheme aims to build three million homes over a five-year period. This big investment has a government budget of around R$100 billion (approx £40 billion/US$65 billion/€ 45 billion). The first phase of Minha Casa, Minha Vida Brazil was launched in early 2009 and aimed initially to build a million houses throughout Brazil. In June 2011 the government announced the start of a second phase comprising a further two million properties.

How does the investment work?

The investment is quite simple. Private persons invest in off-plan property developments in Brazil. Once the property is built and sold to an individual in Brazil, the investor gets the invested money back. Plus a 20% interest rate - in one year!

So why did I invest in this?

There are a number of attractive reasons why I did this investment. Some of them are (not individually ranked):

·         High returns. The returns are set to 20% within 12 month. Not bad!
·         Short-medium investment horizon. The 12 months investment period is a good short investment period, so my money is not tied up too long. Also, there is a chance to prolong the investment period with a similar investment with the same company (a three year investment if I have understood it correctly)
·         Brazil is an excellent place to invest in and the investment type is in high demand. Being one of the famous BRIC-countries, Brazil is definitely a good place to invest in. It has rapid growing economy with high GDP-growth and has a high housing deficit. The picture below illustrates this very well:
 


Picture above comes from the EcoHouse investment prospect

·         A proven investment. The developer is an award winning developer with offices worldwide with proven track record and identical projects already delivered on time. According to Emerald Knight, investors in EcoHouse’s previous investments have received their money back earlier than the agreed 12 months!
·         A social responsible investment. Helping to solve the housing deficit by building houses for people in need of properties with good standard
·         A relatively safe investment. The investment is backed up by the Brazilian government and protected by a Lloyds TSB Escrow facility that offers 100% security. The worst case scenario in the project is that all money is returned to the investor if the project does not go ahead for whatever reason

I will write more about this investment in later postings so you can see if this investment turned out as planned! In one of my next postings I will write about the results from an exciting investment I have made – a carbon credit investment. So stay tuned and subscribe to my blog (at the top right on my blog) - don’t miss out on more interesting stories!

(Flag-picture above from: bestflag.blogspot.se/2012/09/brazil-flag.html)

14 comments:

  1. Brazil land is looking so nice & well designed for our future use of people. So I want the points of standout land knowledge over that. Well! If you want to take the specific criteria regarding Brazil property investment then have look on that.

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  2. Hi Chris,
    Could you please let me know how your experience has been with Brazil investment? Any returns got so far? I am thinking of investing in social housing there, but was wondering if this is a good investment.

    Thanks,
    Sanjay

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Sanjay,

    thanks for your message. I am expecting returns in March and I will definitely let you know how it goes! So stay tuned on my blog!

    Br,
    Christian

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Chris,

    Did you get your returns in March, from the Brazil social housing investment?

    thanks,
    Sanjay

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Sanjay,

    I didn't get the money paid out as agreed. EcoHouse Group claim that there has been a delay in the building process for the project I have invested in... As I understood it the employed work force for building the housese had not done their job which is causing a 6-8 months delay. The explanation they gave sounds quite fishy and strange to me. So I was given the option to get a 1% extra gain on the investment for each month the investment was overdue (if I remember correctly), or to tie up my money for another year and get 20%, and start receiving small payments each quarter until the total payout was due. I chose the latter option. I was told that the first small payment would be done within 20 Days after I had signed the new prolonged contract, but the Money transfer has still not been made... So, in short - nothing EcoHouse Group have promised for the project payments has been delivered!

    Hope this helps to guide your decision...
    I will keep you updated what will happen!

    /Chris

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unfortunately you have fallen in a scam.
      Please read the folowing blog.

      http://theuniquepropertysite.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/lose-money-in-brazil/


      It's a lot of reading, but the dismantling of Ecouse starts with posts around april-2013.
      You are one of the thousands that haven't been paid, and never will be paid.
      Posts of yours on the "uniqueprpertyblog" will be more then welcome.

      Delete
  6. Hi, thanks for the information. I searched for EcoHouse on the homepage you suggested but didn't find anything. Please be more specific about where to look. Thanks.

    Br,
    Christian

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  7. Chris,
    we are trying to get some investors to see if we can salvage anything from our investment in Ecohouse which has unravelled in the past weeks as you may know.
    If you want to get in touch, I can send you an email.

    Btw the link above does contain a lot of comments on the EcoHouse operation, most of them justified by the way it looks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Santope,

      Thanks for your comment. I have not been paid by EcoHouse Group as many others. Even though some people were paid out from the first EcoHouse investment batch I will most likely never see my money again considering that they are now in liquidation. Hopefully we can recover some money together.

      Br
      Chris

      Delete
    2. Hi, you should know of the Creditors' Voluntary Liquidation meeting on 15/1/15. Our group of investors has spent considerable time on this and related issues, and we have certain concerns about this meeting. We are looking for more to join us. How can I make contact with you?

      Delete



    3. chris w.January 10, 2015 at 2:15 PM

      Hi, thanks for comment. Please Contact me by email address alinex.blog@gmail.com. Thank you. /Chris

      Delete
  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  9. The blog author has probably died of shame

    ReplyDelete