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.
For a decade a house in southern Europe came with a passport-shaped bonus. It no longer does, and the buyers who arrive expecting one are a year behind the law. The rules on this page are the ones that decide where a purchase changes your residence, where it changes nothing, and where you are not allowed to buy at all.
What changed
Where a house still matters
Monaco. A lease or a purchase plus a bank deposit of the order of half a million and a clean record is the entry to the resident card, and the apartment is the price of admission to a regime with no income tax, no wealth tax and no capital gains tax for individuals. Nowhere else on this list does the house so directly buy the jurisdiction.
Dubai. A property of two million dirhams or more, roughly half a million euros, entitles the owner to a renewable ten-year residence visa. It is real, it is used, and it is why a share of the buyers on the Palm are there. The emirate has no income tax and no capital gains tax; the house carries the visa, not the tax position, which follows from where you actually live.
The United States. A house buys nothing; the investor visa route is a business investment. Buyers in Miami and New York hold on visitor status and count days, because American tax residence is a trap that closes at 183 of them.
The four fences
The fences are the reason those four markets are as stable as they are. Buyers who qualify benefit from the exclusion of everyone who does not, and a house inside a fence holds value through cycles that flatten the open markets. The desk asks whether a buyer may purchase before it asks what they want.
Where the residency is a tax, not a right
Buy on the Riviera and the IFI, the wealth tax on real estate, applies to a non-resident on the French property above 1.3 million. Buy in the Balearics or Andalusia and the solidarity tax applies above three million of net Spanish assets per person. Buy in Switzerland and the canton taxes wealth and the imputed rent, until the abolition Swiss voters agreed in 2025 takes effect. None of these makes you resident; all of them make you a taxpayer, and the holding instrument carries them.
A house never bought a residence that a good lawyer could not have arranged without it. It has often bought a tax bill that a good lawyer would have avoided.
The desk's adviser in three jurisdictionsThe honest order
- Decide where you will actually live and for how many days.
- Take the residency and tax advice in that jurisdiction before you look at a house.
- Check whether the market has a fence and whether you are inside it.
- Then buy the house you would have bought anyway.
Run the numbers
Holding Costs
What a house costs every year you own it, from property tax to the gardener, in each hotspot.
