"The Little Seoul Real Estate MeetUp That Could".. almost 100 LIKES & 56 Members..

[Daniel Ryu]

Greetings to the Bigger Pockets readers..

Just an update from our latest, Dec 6 Meetup

Looking at the headline, you might be thinking, "Meh!"

But @John Van Uytven  , @Benjamin Hauser , and I are really proud of how our small meetup ("let's grab some coffee since we all in happen to be in Seoul and are BP members) has continued to grow!

Thanks to John's decision to create a MeetUp page ("..maybe we'll get 2 other people to join us.."), we've now had 2 Official MeetUps and 1 informal Happy Hour.

In each of our events, adding to the 'international flavor' of our group, we've had at least one visitor from out of Korea in attendance.

At the first one, we had Andrew Kim, Investor from Hong Kong, who had just closed on his first purchase of a one room officetel in Seoul.

At our happy hour, fellow BP members @Maxwell Lee and his now wife @Kelly L. , visiting Korea from Jacksonville, Florida, as part of a month-long, world-travel vacation / honeymoon showed up.

And at our most recent one, held on Dec 6, we had international investor Rose, president of the United Group based in Taiwan, who helps bring Asian money into the US, UK, and other places. She started out investing in Taiwan, branched out to the US, and now's looking to invest in construction in Myanmar, which I was surprised to learn, has a population of 60 million.

To accommodate our growing membership, this time we held the meeting at a TOZ - a place that rents out room space for about $3 / hour / per person. (You can see fellow BP Member @Jacob Michaels with the baby on his lap ^^)

John gave a presentation on investment strategies: "Hedgehog vs Fox" as well as a workshop on Goal Setting.

As part of our strategy to provide value to our members, we send out detailed notes from each meeting, including member profiles to help everyone keep track of who's doing what and who's interested in what: (example below)

And we're hoping to build our Facebook page (which has grown to almost 100 LIKES) in order to build more credibility for the group and attract more people we can network with and share resources with. 

In keeping with the BP ethos, we don't want our meetups to turn into a pitch forum:

(from our Meetup About Us page)

So far we've been pleasantly surprised with the results. As @Joshua Dorkin mentioned on the podcast (or it might have been Brandon), our group is pretty active and we get almost half the membership to attend our meetings.

We're even thinking about branching out into subgroups for people who want to play Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Game (unsurprisingly at least 4 people have the $250 board game!!), planning a field trip to look at real estate in Korea, and we created a lending library for people to share real estate books with each other through a Google Doc we set up.

Anyways, if you're going to be in Korea anytime soon and want to join our next meetup, let us know! We might even set up a special meetup just for your visit!

And for anyone living in Korea... Hope to see you at the next one!

Of course, all thanks goes to Bigger Pockets for setting up this website that allows real estate investors from all over the world connect! 

To learn more about us (Press here) - link to our MeetUp Page.

[Daniel Ryu]

@John Van Uytven 

 Thanks for the kind words! It's been a great team effort ^^

@Brandon Turner @Joshua Dorkin 

Joshua & Brandon, I know you've heard it many times before, but you've done so much for real estate investors worldwide! If there's any little thing I can do to help expand the Bigger Pockets brand and raise awareness, I'm happy to oblige! 

We have a system down for our meetups - greeting new members (sometimes with a video intro), post meeting, etc, and we'll be working on creating a set format for our meetups (we may model the BP podcast ^^). So if anyone's interested in sharing ideas on building strong meetups, drop me a line.

@Joshua Springer 

Sounds great! You'd be welcome out here - I have a few buddies from Ohio actually. Love that we have so many people wanting to support our group. 

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There is a lot of interest in Real Estate among Koreans and Asians. Asians tend to have more savings (to rent an apartment, for example, most people have to put down a deposit of $10,000 or more in Seoul. That's just a small studio. To rent a 3 bedroom house? Over $200,000.. Not to own.. just to rent!) so they have assets to invest, but property prices out here are just so incredibly high. It's amazing the reactions I get when I tell people about property prices in the US.

BiggerPockets Asia anyone?? Not sure how that would work ^^ but I do know this - Since everyone out here learns English, Asia technically has more English speakers than the rest of the world.

Thanks again for all the support. We hope to continue our progress.