More than 2 million British citizens now either own or are actively looking for homes abroad: a number that is expected to rise to more than 3 million within 5 years, according to fi gures from Saga. By 2025, according to a study published recently by Grant Thornton, the accountants, over 2 million British homeowners – around a tenth of the total homeowners in the country, could own a property overseas. Mintel, the respected research company, conducted a study found that over 800,000 British people now own a home abroad, and double that number would like to buy one. The viewing fi gures for TV pro¬grammes such as ‘No Going Back’ would support the belief that the potential overseas property buyer population is substantially higher than that. If you add the populations of the other rich overseas prop¬erty buyers – the Dutch, the Germans, the Irish, the Americans and, to a lesser extent, the French and the Italians (who are more inclined to buy additional property in their own country) – it is not too diffi -cult to believe the word-of-mouth statistic that over 15 million people are looking for homes overseas.
Why buy property overseas?
The reasons are myriad: some consider the possibility of buying a second home either as a place to which to retire or as an invest¬ment (either by way of a ‘buy-to-let’ or in the anticipation of capital gain).
The investment imperative for buying international property, par¬ticularly in less developed parts of the globe, is coming from factors such as the diminishing value of conventional pensions and annuities, increasing life expectancy and the need to diversify property investments, all of which are growing in importance and apply to a greater or lesser extent to all the countries whose citizens are casting their eyes across continents and oceans searching out new areas of property value.
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