We asked a Singaporean who owns 27 US rental properties the unglamorous question — and his answer is the most useful part.
On paper, US rental property reads like a cheat code for Singaporean investors. Homes at a fraction of local prices. Gross yields near 12%. Tenants paying down your mortgage in US dollars. And no Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty, no matter how many you own.
That is genuinely true. We’ve written before about Weihan, the Singaporean engineer who, with his wife Tracy, built a portfolio of 27 US rental homes and left corporate life in his 30s.
But here’s the uncomfortable other half: the same features that make the opportunity attractive also make it easy to lose money, quietly, from 15,000 km away, often before you realise anything is wrong. So when we caught up with Han again, we asked the question the highlight reels skip: how do people actually lose money doing this?
His answer was refreshingly blunt. We’ve expanded it into the seven traps we think every Singaporean should understand before wiring a single dollar overseas.
1. The “1% rule” trap: great metric, terrible neighbourhood
The 1% rule, where the monthly rent is at least 1% of the purchase price, is a useful screen, not a guarantee of a good deal. It has a dark side: the cheapest homes often hit that number precisely because they sit in high-crime or economically declining neighbourhoods.
A US$60,000 house renting for US$700 a month looks spectacular in a spreadsheet. What the spreadsheet doesn’t show is the chronic vacancy, the tenant who stops paying, the broken windows, and the buyer pool of exactly nobody when you try to sell.
Han’s mitigation is deliberately boring: he buys middle-class homes in stable, safe neighbourhoods, places with population growth and real job demand, and never based on price alone. He’d rather accept a slightly lower headline yield in an area that stays rentable for the next decade than chase a fantasy number in an area that’s emptying out.
2. Buying blind
Listings flatter. Photos are shot at the right angle, the description omits the train line behind the fence, and a street can change character in a single block. From Singapore, it’s dangerously easy to buy a postcode you’ve never actually seen.
This is where remote investors get hurt: they treat an online listing as ground truth. The fix is to put eyes on the property and the street before committing. An independent inspection, a local agent who isn’t simply trying to offload their own inventory, and a real read of the surrounding area rather than the polished render. Doing the homework upfront is far cheaper than discovering the truth after closing.
3. Your team is everything and a weak one bleeds you slowly
You can’t be in two places at once, so a remote portfolio lives or dies on the people running it day-to-day: the property manager, agents, lenders, inspectors and handymen.
A weak property manager is the most common slow leak. Inadequate tenant screening lets in the wrong tenant. Slow repairs and ignored complaints push good tenants out. Suddenly your “positive cash flow” property is sitting vacant, or worse, accumulating damage. Because you’re not there, the losses can run for months before they show up clearly in your statements.
Han treats his team as the single most important part of the system, and runs it on a “trust but verify” basis. He checks the monthly statements, confirms the rent has actually landed in his account, and spot-checks that things are as reported, but lets capable people do their jobs.
4. Tenant-friendly states and eviction hazards
The “US market” isn’t one market. It’s effectively fifty legal systems. Landlord-tenant law varies enormously by state, and some jurisdictions (New York City among them) lean heavily toward tenants.
In a tenant-friendly state, removing a non-paying or destructive tenant can take many months and meaningful legal cost, all while you keep paying the mortgage. There’s even a term in the US for people who exploit this: “professional tenants” who know exactly how to stretch the process.
The lesson isn’t to avoid the US; it’s to choose your jurisdiction with eyes open and understand the local rules *before* you buy, not after you’re trying to evict someone.
5. The boring capex that eats your “profit”
Roofs. HVAC systems. Plumbing. Foundations. A lot of US rental stock is older than people expect, and one unbudgeted repair can swallow a year of cash flow.
The mistake is treating gross yield as take-home pay. The investors who survive underwrite conservatively: they set aside reserves, budget for capital expenditure as a matter of routine, inspect properly before buying, and assume something expensive will eventually break, because it will. The “12% gross” headline is only meaningful after you’ve subtracted buffers for repairs.
6. Middleman exploitation
A foreign buyer who can’t easily pop down to check on things is, frankly, a target. Some agents flip overpriced inventory to overseas investors. Some contractors pad invoices for work that’s hard to verify from another continent. And plenty of “gurus” are happy to sell the dream while quietly taking a cut of everything you touch.
The defence is independent verification: get your own quotes, insist on references, separate the people who sell you the property from the people who manage it and the people who inspect it, so no single party can mark you up unchecked.
7. The financing and cash realities
Two things surprise Singaporeans most. First, you can’t use CPF for any of this. It’s cash and US financing only. Second, while tools like DSCR loans (which qualify the loan on the property’s rent rather than your personal income) genuinely help foreigners borrow, the rate environment matters.
In 2026, the US 30-year fixed has been hovering around 6.5%, with hopes of near-term cuts fading. The “buy, improve, refinance, repeat” engine that let early investors pull their capital back out and roll it forward still works but it’s tighter than it was during the cheap-money years. Anyone modelling their plan on a 3% refinance is setting themselves up for disappointment. Underwrite for today’s rates and treat any future refinance as upside rather than the base case.
The common thread
Read back through those seven, and you’ll notice none of them are about bad luck. Each one is a knowledge gap. A neighbourhood not understood, a team not vetted, a law not checked, a repair not budgeted, a middleman not questioned.
That’s Han’s blunt summary: treat US property like a business, not a lottery ticket. The gap between his 27-property portfolio and somebody’s overseas horror story is mostly process and education.
It’s also, candidly, why people pay to learn the systems rather than improvising with their savings on the line.
Learn the full playbook for free
Han (Weihan) and Tracy, founders of Byte Sized Investments, are running a free online preview for the Dr Wealth community, walking through how they built and manage their US portfolio, and going deeper on exactly the mistakes above and how they avoid them.
📅 Thursday, 16 July · 7:30pm (SGT) · Online 👉 Register free.
