Football Legend Turned Property Tycoon Looks to US Market

Robbie Fowler was a formidable striker for Liverpool football club, becoming Britain's 3rd richest footballer and earning a place in the nation's heart.

However, less well-known outside of north-west England is Fowler's incredible track record as an astute property investor, with a portfolio of buy-to-let properties worth more than £30m in and around his home turf.

Indeed, one of the chants at Liverpool matches is "we all live in a Robbie Fowler home" (to the tune of Yellow Submarine), in reference to the ex-premiership footballer's 100 buy-to-let properties in the city and its surrounds.

Unlike most of his premiership peers, Robbie Fowler got in early, buying dozens of cheap terrace houses in the north-west - including a whole street in Oldham - in the late nineties, when they cost less than £20,000 each and today, they are worth more than £100,000 each.

Now, the former Liverpool star-turned-property-tycoon is looking to the US for property bargains saying, "The dollar is weak at the moment and with talk of the UK property market overheating, the time is ripe for UK investors to take a serious look at the US property market".

Fowler added that investing in US property could deliver returns of around 10% for investors saying that "buy-to-let is out of reach for a lot of people at the moment, so making it simple and easy to invest is the key and what is interesting in the US is the sheer scale of opportunity for investors as the markets rebound from the economic fallout".

Robbie Fowler is said to have become interested in property investment originally because he liked the fact it is a tangible asset, making more logical sense to him than investing in stocks. Now he is extending his buy-to-let portfolio to include a range of properties in the US using the same selection criteria that achieved huge success in the past.

"Multi-family residences in the US remind me of the properties I invested in the North of England – opportunities for development and improvements, which can better house hard-working families," he said.

Furthermore, there are US buy-to-let opportunities starting from around £20,000, meaning that footballer-sized salaries are not required, making capital growth and rental incomes a realistic prospect for more modest investors.