By Julian Ashworth · Editor-in-Chief
In the years I spent as a foreign correspondent, the most instructive experiences were almost always the slow ones. The story that revealed itself over months of patient reporting rather than in a single dramatic event. The source who needed to be met six times before they said the thing they had been saying for years but had never said to a journalist. The city that seemed impenetrable for a year and then one afternoon, without warning, opened itself up.
I have thought about this a good deal while editing Holiday Home Times, because the property and residency industry is, structurally, an industry that benefits from urgency. "The Golden Visa threshold increases next month." "Prices in this neighbourhood are rising week on week." "The programme closes to new applications in Q3." Some of these statements are true. Most are partly true. A few are entirely fabricated. All of them push toward a decision made faster than it should be.
The readers I most admire — and I have been fortunate to correspond with many of them over the past two years — are those who resist this. They take eighteen months to research a market before buying. They visit a location four times before committing to the school enrolment that precipitates the property purchase. They read the programme terms themselves, ask a lawyer to explain the parts they don't understand, and then ask another lawyer. They are often described as slow decision-makers by the agents and developers they deal with. They are, in my experience, almost always the ones who are satisfied with the outcome.
The cost of haste in property
The mistakes I have seen readers make — and this publication has a relationship with its readers that is personal enough that people do share their mistakes with me — are almost never the mistakes of excessive deliberation. They are the mistakes of insufficient deliberation. The off-plan purchase in a market they had visited once. The Golden Visa property bought at the advice of a developer with no independent legal review. The residency programme applied for without understanding the tax implications in the country being left behind.
These are recoverable mistakes, mostly. But they are expensive, and they are avoidable, and they almost always trace back to a decision made faster than the evidence supported.
This issue of HHT covers markets — Greece, Italy, Barbados, Portugal's digital nomad visa, the European holiday rental market in the first half of 2026 — where the opportunity is real and where the temptation to act quickly is understandable. I would ask you to resist that temptation, or at least to subject it to scrutiny. The opportunity in almost any of these markets will be substantially similar in six months. The quality of the decision made after six months of research will be substantially better than the one made this afternoon.
Slowness is not hesitation. It is the discipline of allowing good information to accumulate before you act on it. In property, as in most things, that discipline pays.
Julian Ashworth is Editor-in-Chief of Holiday Home Times. He is based in Lisbon, where he continues to work on a book about the maritime history of the Tagus estuary that has been nearly finished since 2019.