As we bid goodbye to 2020 and look forward to 2021, it becomes important that we use the vantage point that we are at, to provide some insights to you our readers. Firstly, I want to share with you a short video that our team created looking at the past year.
However, we want to leave you with also a few of our insights based on the numerous interactions we have with government bodies, prospective buyers and real estate developers. While the subject is vast, we want to pick out a few that we feel will stand out in 2021:-
- The rise of fractional investments: While fractional sales have been around in one form or the other, we have not seen them becoming popular till date. However, we see this as part of a larger trend of digitization of assets and this is strongly driven by a desire from consumers to make passive income from their capital but from the comfort of their home. To enable this we have seen the rise of multiple third-party platforms and we feel many of these will create the right environment for real estate developers to consider fractional as a significant portion of their sales.
- Agriculture becoming more mainstream: Blame it on Covid, but the lockdowns around the world, being cooped up in an apartment or villa has led to many consumers wanted to spend more time with nature, eat cleaner food, spend more time outdoors and seek more personal involvement in growing food and living closer to nature. This, in our opinion will give a fillip to more rural properties with larger acreage.
- The rise of the city-state or the micro country: While many smaller countries in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, Pacific have had a tourism strategy for a while, they have not required to think more deeply about the long-term relationship they build with other people from across the globe. A transactional focus on short visitors, the great income, and the lack of a need to build supporting infrastructure that could be used by their own citizens or the visitors while good in 2019, has been exposed as very fragile in 2020. We expect many of them to introspect deeper and go back to a more balanced approach focused on courting long-term investors or residents and this will lead to many new policies, categories of visas, and categories of passports. There is just no other way in our opinion whereby these countries can attract long term patient capital as opposed to a renewed focus on real estate. Hence we expect to see many new schemes.
- A more equal relationship between developers and customers. In many ways, the developer in the past made all the decisions. He decided where to buy land, what he would build there, and how much to charge for the same. We believe this model is broken and will come under significant pressure in the new world. It will be replaced in our opinion by a model that will resemble self-development to a large extent where customers will have more transparency and a say in what gets built and the kind of amenities and features.
- Lastly, the resurgence of the city resort residence. With many high net worth individuals traveling more frequently, we expect the allure of the very convenient serviced residence in prime parts of the city to come back and to offer a great yield to investors. These will replace the hotel suite for many and for others will be a permanent way to live in comfort in a good locality.
In closing, we the team at Holiday Home Times would like to wish all our readers the very best of health, wealth and prosperity in the New Year 2021. We look forward to continuing to assist you in realizing your dreams and aspirations.
