By Julian Ashworth · Editor-in-Chief
Something has shifted in the conversations I have with readers. It happened gradually over 2024 and has accelerated through the first quarter of this year. The question is no longer simply where to buy — it is how to structure a life that works across more than one country at once.
The people asking are not footloose nomads. They are, in the main, established professionals and business owners in their forties and fifties: people with children in good schools, with businesses that have outgrown simple national frameworks, with the accumulated capital to act and the awareness that the tax and residency landscape they built their plans on is changing faster than anyone predicted. They want to understand the options. They are, in the best sense, paying attention.
This issue of Holiday Home Times is built around what I am calling the great rebalancing — the repositioning of the Western-hemisphere property and residency market as the dominant axis of intelligent international mobility. The reasons are both obvious and worth stating clearly.
Why the Americas and Europe are winning
Portugal remains, by some distance, the most coherent destination in Europe for internationally mobile families — notwithstanding the abolition of the original NHR regime and the slightly rocky introduction of its successor. Valentina Cruz, who relocated here under the original NHR and has now renegotiated her relationship with the Portuguese tax system under its newer framework, writes from personal experience on page four. The conclusion is more nuanced than the headlines suggested: Portugal's fundamentals have not changed.
The Caribbean Citizenship by Investment programmes are, in aggregate, having their best year since 2015. The programmes in St. Kitts, Grenada, Antigua and Dominica have each quietly improved their proposition — either through reformed due diligence standards that make the passport more universally respected, or through processing innovations that have dramatically compressed timelines. Priya Nair-Santos covers the comparative landscape in detail.
In the Americas, the investment case for Panama City continues to strengthen — particularly for North American buyers who have watched Miami's condominium market absorb an extraordinary supply wave with rather less grace than the developers promised. Nadia Patel sets out the numbers with characteristic rigour.
A note on editorial method
Readers who have been with us for some time will know that this publication does not accept payment for editorial coverage, does not run sponsored content under an editorial masthead, and does not take commission on any transaction that follows from our writing. I mention this again not to congratulate ourselves — it should be the baseline for any publication that asks readers to make decisions on the basis of its work — but because we are increasingly aware that much of what presents itself as property and residency journalism online is something else entirely.
The great rebalancing creates opportunities for well-informed readers and significant risks for poorly-informed ones. Our job is to close that gap.
I hope this issue proves useful. The team has done what they always do: gone to the primary sources, verified the numbers, and written the kind of piece they would want to read if they were making the decision themselves.
Julian Ashworth is Editor-in-Chief of Holiday Home Times. He has been based in Lisbon since 2024.