The property market at home is hard enough to predict. How do you pick the
right property overseas? Following our five Rs guide to overseas buying
would be a good start.
Reason: Why are you buying overseas? Holiday home, rental
income, capital growth? Many people see overseas property as the holy grail
of investment, somewhere you can have free holidays and make rental money
when you’re not there, as the place soars in value. Dream on. The impressive
price rises of the past are no longer happening, except maybe in the
high-risk scenarios of eastern Europe. Even China’s dizzying results have
stalled. And holiday rentals may help cover costs, but that’s about all. The
high season is alarmingly short, the supply in some areas far outstrips
demand (see French gîtes and Spanish apartments) and the tastes of the
holiday-going public are not always easy to predict. A few more news stories
about bird flu, and who’ll fancy a break in Turkey?
Research: Look behind the enticing brochures and selling
agents’ breezy number- crunching to the reality of your chosen country/area/
development. What are the laws on foreign ownership, inheritance and tax?
What are the overall development plans for the area? Do they involve a
motorway alongside your villa? Is the developer actually going to be able to
complete the golf course and other promised amenities now that the Sipps
investment window has been slammed on many potential sales? Read the
newspapers, use the internet judiciously and hire a qualified lawyer to
investigate planning issues.
Rentability: You might like a picturesque semi-ruin up a
Portuguese dirt track furnished with the contents of your recently deceased
auntie’s house in Wolverhampton, but paying customers may have different
ideas. Take advice about the rental market from a source other than the
person trying to flog you the property: what people want, and how much
they’ll pay for it. Never expect holiday rental to do more than help to
cover the running costs.
Ryanair: The effect of the no-frills airlines’ new routes to
dozens of tiny regional airports across Europe acted like a shot of growth
hormone into the buttocks of stunted property markets. Planeloads of Brits
discovered undervalued properties in unspoilt communities and have
proceeded, by sheer weight of their numbers, to reverse both these
conditions. Get in ahead of the next new routes and you might make a quick
killing. But be aware that a lot of these routes exist because the local
authorities pay the airline to deliver passengers to them, and if this
arrangement were to stop (as was threatened last year at Nîmes in the south
of France), so would the flights.
Resale: Rita Fryer, who covers Catalonia for The Property
Finders search agents, says that the first thing she thinks about when
assessing a property is, how easy will it be to sell in future? The better
the market, the more likely it is to show a decent capital return. So beware
of quirky, high-maintenance, remote properties, especially if they’ve been
on the market for a while. At the other end of the scale, a property in an
area full of new development will face a lot of competition in the market
unless it is on a prime development with added amenities such as a top-class
golf course and a spa.
What all this adds up to is the big, obvious R: reality check. But there’s no
doubt that overseas property can still represent good value to the British
buyer who goes into the deal with clear planning and some good advice.
David Lethbridge, 42, and his fiancée, Michaela Jedinak, 38, last year paid
£240,000 for a three-bedroom townhouse with three terraces and a communal
pool on the Lauro Golf development, about 40 minutes’ drive inland from
Marbella in southern Spain.
“We have a two-bedroom flat in Belsize Park, north London,” explains
Lethbridge, managing director of wedding planning business confetti.co.uk.
“We wanted a bigger place with a garden, but soon realised that in the
London market, for an extra £250,000 we wouldn’t get anything significantly
better without moving area, which we didn’t want to do.”
“Barbara Wood, who covers Andalusia for The Property Finders, found us our
house,” adds Jedinak, who runs the Joy of Colour, a style consultancy.
“She steered us away from our original choice of the Costa de la Luz, which
can be cold and windy in winter, to our house, half an hour from Malaga
airport, as we wanted holidays and long weekends all year round.
“We’re facing the mountains, which are protected so they can’t be built on,
and it’s very low-maintenance [Wood also advised them against taking on an
isolated old farmhouse]. We may rent it out when we’re not using it, as
other owners on the development do.”
“If we had spent the money in London we would hardly have noticed the
difference to our lives,” Lethbridge tells me over the phone as he and
Jedinak spend a weekend break in Spain, where she rides at the local
stables.
As well as frequent weekends in the Andalusian sunshine, Lethbridge also
appreciates having his property assets and borrowings split between Spain
and Britain. “Another benefit of this place is its flexibility. If anything
happens, we can sell or rent.”
