By Roshan L. D’Silva · Smart Buy
By now you know roughly how often you will go, who with, what you want to do there and what you can spend. That brief is what turns an unmanageable world into a shortlist of three.
The single most useful thing I can tell you about this stage is that ease of access, not price, is what decides whether you use the place. Recall the finding from the first article in this series: 37% of owners visit once a year or less. Very little of that is because they stopped liking the house. Most of it is friction — two flights, a connection that only runs on Tuesdays, a four-hour drive at the far end.
A slightly less perfect house two hours from your door gets visited five times a year. A perfect one that takes a day each way gets visited at Easter.
Cut the list with hard filters first
Take the wish list and apply the things that are simply true, before taste gets involved.
- Can you own there at all? In a third of the markets we cover a foreigner cannot hold freehold, and in some cannot buy at all. Our guide to foreign-ownership rules across 65 markets resolves this in a minute and removes places that were never available to you.
- Can you get there without changing planes? Check actual schedules, in your low season as well as summer. Many resort routes are seasonal and vanish in November.
- Does your budget buy something you would want? Not something — something you would want. If your number buys the worst house in the best village, that is a different proposition from the best house in a village you have not heard of.
- Can you let it, if letting matters? Several markets that welcome foreign buyers restrict short lets sharply. Establish this before you fall for a house, not after.
Four filters usually take a list of a dozen countries down to three or four places. That is the point at which visiting becomes worthwhile.
Then go, and go at the wrong time of year
Anywhere is charming in its best month. You need to know what you are buying in its worst one.
Go off-season, and stay a week rather than a weekend. Rent, if you can, the kind of property you are considering, in the area you are considering. A hotel in the centre tells you about the centre; it tells you nothing about the lane you would actually live on.
What to pay attention to while you are there:
How much is still open
Walk the town on a wet Tuesday in the low season. Count what is trading. In many resort towns the answer is startling — the restaurants, the pharmacy, the good bakery and half the shops close for months. If your plan involves February visits, this is the single most useful hour you will spend.
How long things actually take
Time the drive from the airport yourself, at the hour you would actually arrive. Time the drive to a supermarket, and to whatever you would do most days — the beach, the hill, the golf, the dive shop. Distances on a map and distances on a mountain road are not the same measurement.
Medical cover
Find out where the nearest hospital with an emergency department is, and how far it is at three in the morning. Then find out where the nearest one you would actually choose is, which is sometimes considerably further. This matters more every year you own the place, and it matters most for the buyers who eventually spend longer stays there.
Who else is there in winter
Is there a resident community, or does the population fall by four fifths? Both can work — a genuinely local town and a seasonal resort are different propositions, and plenty of people are happy in either. But know which one you are buying into, because the second is a very quiet place to be alone in January.
What it is like to be a foreigner there
Can you deal with a bank, a builder and a doctor in the local language, or with the language you have? Is there an established community of buyers like you, and does that matter to you? Some people want it; others move abroad specifically to avoid it.
Talk to owners, not only to agents
An agent is paid on completion, which does not make them dishonest but does make them optimistic. Owners are the better source, and they are usually happy to talk.
Ask them the three questions that produce useful answers: What surprised you after you bought? What does it cost you a year, all in? If you were doing it again, would you buy in the same place — and the same kind of property?
The third question is the one worth travelling for. A striking number of owners say yes to the place and no to the property — they would buy the apartment rather than the villa, or the village rather than the hillside.
Rank what you saw against the brief, not against the photographs
When you get home, go back to your answers from the first article and score each place against them. How many weeks would we really come here? Would the children keep coming? Is what we actually do on holiday available here in March?
It is worth doing this in writing, because the memory of a good week distorts judgement in a way that a list resists. The place that wins on the list and loses on the photographs is very often the right answer.
Then narrow to one, and start the real work
Once you have a place, the questions become specific and technical: who may own, on what title, with what permission, and what the contract says when it goes wrong. That is the due-diligence stage, and it is the point at which you stop being a tourist and start being a buyer.
We take no commission from any agent, developer or destination mentioned anywhere on this site, and nothing here is advice about your particular circumstances.