Uniting the World's Premium Assets with China's Elites

Over the past three years, the first question clients ask has changed. They used to ask "is this rising fast here"; now they ask "how will this property be sold later". The way a question is asked says more about this market cycle than any market data.

What "able to exit" means

Three conditions must hold at the same time: someone will buy it, the paperwork is clean, and the money can come back. Someone will buy it means there is real local demand in the secondary market, not just handovers among foreign investors; the paperwork is clean means clear title, simple holding structure, and a mortgage that can be assumed or prepaid without heavy penalties; the money can come back means the path for moving sale proceeds out of the country is thought through before you buy, not asked about when you sell.

Three things you can test before buying

Look at the days on market, not the asking price; calculate the full cost of selling—agent commission, capital gains tax, mortgage prepayment fees, FX and cross-border transfer costs; and ask yourself who the buyer would be if you had to sell within three years. If you cannot name a specific type of buyer, the project depends on "the next foreign investor", and it will be the first to lose liquidity when conditions change.

Our approach: when screening projects, we assess the exit test and the buying rationale on the same page. Projects where we can explain "why it is worth buying" but not "who will buy it later" are usually not taken to clients.

Residency and property are two separate things, but they affect each other. When the order is wrong, most of the time it is not that the plan fails—it is that it costs more, adds a year, or has to be redone from scratch.

Buy the property first, apply for residency later: three common sticking points

First, the source-of-funds documentation does not line up: by the time you buy, the money has already left the country, and when you apply for residency you have to explain where the money came from and how it moved. Second, owning the asset first can change the tax picture: whose name the property is registered under, which country it is in, and whether it generates rent can all affect how the local tax authorities determine tax residence, which in turn changes the documentation logic for the application—this is completely invisible at the time of purchase. Third, family sequencing gets disrupted: the property is bought, but the main applicant is not the owner.

Three questions to decide the order

Who in the family goes first, when the children start school, and where the money is now. Once these three are answered, the order largely reveals itself: work backwards from the school enrolment date, arrange the documentation around the main applicant, and let the current location of the funds decide the first step. If you do it the other way round, every earlier step ends up being redone for the last step.

Our approach: before every Private Salon and Overseas Property Tour, we first map out the family situation—placing residency, property, education and tax on a single timeline—and only then decide which comes first.

The purchase price is just the entry fee. What really determines whether an overseas property is affordable to keep is the few fixed expenses that occur every year—many people calculate them when buying, then discover in the second year of living there that they had underestimated.

What you pay whether you live there or not

HOA or community management fees, property tax or municipal tax, home insurance, maintenance and depreciation, tax filing and accounting services, and security and property management during vacancy. These do not disappear because no one lives there.

What only appears when you rent it out

Rental management fees (usually a percentage of rent), the vacancy period that inevitably occurs each year, agent fees for finding tenants, rental income tax and filing, and replacement of furniture and appliances. Cross-border adds another layer: remittance fees and FX spreads, and the accounting cost of filing in two places.

How to estimate a figure

Convert the annual fixed costs into a percentage of the purchase price, then see how much the rent covers; the remainder is your annual net expense. Across the markets we work with, many locations fall in the 1%–2% range of the purchase price, with rental management charged separately; figures vary greatly from country to country, and the final reference is always the local tax bill and property statement.

Scale and results do not go hand in hand. An expo lets people see; a meeting lets people decide—the two solve different problems, not one being better than the other.

What an expo of 5,000 gives you

Low information density, dozens of booths each getting three minutes; no one accountable, anyone can chat on site but no one follows up after; a bag full of materials, none of which leads to a next step at home. This is not the expo's fault—it was never designed to make people decide.

What 98 people changed

The agenda follows the order of decision-making, not the products; with fewer people, questions can be asked and answered in full; advisors are present, note each family's situation on the spot, and follow up one-on-one afterwards. We hold three requirements for this event: do not talk about "why it is worth buying" but "how to judge it", leave question time for every session, and ensure a follow-up within 48 hours after the event.

If you are still comparing several countries and several projects, an expo is more efficient; once you have decided to land in one country, a meeting is more useful. The usual order is expo first, meeting second.

The conversations that really matter mostly happen after the agenda ends. The stage is for methods; the seats are where families talk about their own affairs.

The conversations that really matter mostly happen after the agenda ends. On stage are methods; in the seats, families talk about their own affairs.

Exit and succession—how the property will be handled in the end and whether the children will take it over; tax and filing—what to file this year, who files it, and what happens if it is filed wrong; timeline—school enrolment, the residency cycle, and fund arrival, and how to put the three lines on one sheet.

Why they are not asked on stage

They all involve the specifics of a family: who runs what business, where the money came from, how the children perform at school. These are not suited to being discussed in front of dozens of people. So the agenda covers methods, and after the event families talk about their own affairs—half the value of a meeting is on stage, the other half is after the stage ends.

How we follow through: the same advisor throughout, no change of contact; a reply within 24 hours, offering the next step rather than a document pack; and for anything that needs action, a private meeting or a site visit is arranged.