The private market
How off-market actually works
Three tiers, a handful of people who hold the keys, and one document that opens every door. The mechanism behind the sales nobody sees.
Every piece
The Journal
How prime property is bought, held and sold in practice, written for the people signing rather than for the people browsing.
The private market
The numbers
What a house really costs to buy
Sixteen jurisdictions, one ten-million house, and a door that costs anything from sixty thousand to nearly two million. The acquisition cost, line by line.
The private market
Proof of funds and the NDA
The two documents that separate buyers who see houses from buyers who see listings, and how to handle each without giving anything away.
The numbers
The holding cost nobody budgets
A house costs something every year whether you are in it or not. The lines that make up the bill, where they are large, and the two that are invisible until the first year's end.
The private market
Selling quietly
How a family sells a house without a photograph in circulation, why it is often the better price, and what it asks of the seller in return.
The numbers
The exit, decided at purchase
Capital gains rules differ more than prices do: nothing in Monaco and Dubai, nothing after ten years in Germany, a flat thirty in Austria, a taper in France. The exit is the part of the return most buyers never model.
The private market
Family offices and the private market
The buyers who have quietly become the top of every hotspot: how a family office buys a house, what it wants from a desk, and why sellers prefer it.
The numbers
The currency question
A house in francs, pounds, dollars or dirhams is a currency position whether you wanted one or not. What it has done to buyers in the last fifteen years, and how to decide before you are in love.
The places
Residency and property
Where a house still comes with a right to stay, where it never did, and the four markets that have a fence around them. The rules as they stand, and what changed.
The numbers
Reading a price per square metre
The most quoted number in property and the least useful at the top of it. What it measures, what it hides, and how the Ranesta Index uses it anyway.
The places
Waterfront, mountain, city
The three kinds of prime asset behave differently in a cycle, cost differently to hold and sell to different people. Which one you are buying matters more than where.
The places
The hotspot cycle
Prime markets do not move together. Dubai has fallen forty per cent twice; the Gold Coast of Zürich has not fallen in living memory. How the cycle works at the top, and how to buy through it.
The method
Due diligence in six jurisdictions
The document that decides the purchase is different in every country: the planning file in Spain, the notary's searches in France, the geometra's survey in Italy, the lease in London. What to read, and who reads it.
The method
New build or heritage
A rebuilt villa on the Golden Mile and a listed villa on Como are both ten million and are not the same asset. What each costs to buy, to keep and to sell, and which one the market will want in twenty years.
The Private Letter
One letter a month.
One letter a month: what moved in the hotspots, one anonymised sale explained, one number worth knowing. No advertising, no tracking, one click to leave.