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.
Your result
The Family Office
Buys for the principals and the next generation, with a structure, a mandate and a spreadsheet.
You buy on behalf of a family, which means the house is an allocation before it is a home. Jurisdiction, structure, holding cost, the exit tax in the year the grandchildren sell: these are decided first and the house is found to fit them. You buy quietly, often before a renovation, and you would rather pay a fair price privately than a good price in public.
What works for you
You are the buyer the desk is built for: qualified before the first call, decisive within a week, indifferent to a listing. Sellers with a blind instruction look for you. You also hold longest, which in prime property is the whole return.
What to watch
Over-structuring, and the temptation to treat a house as a security. Some of the best assets on this list are worth having precisely because they do not behave like a spreadsheet. Let the principals see the house before the committee prices it.
Structure
Whatever the family's existing architecture allows, checked against the annual charges that now punish corporate ownership of homes in Britain and the residence rules of Switzerland and Austria. A mandate with the desk and a lawyer in each jurisdiction before the search.
The hotspots that fit
Zürich & Zug
The Gold Coast, Enge and Fluntern, and the low-tax hills of Zug and Wollerau.
London
Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Belgravia, Notting Hill and St John's Wood.
Monaco
The Carré d'Or, Larvotto, Fontvieille and the new land at Mareterra.
Lake Como
Cernobbio, Laglio, the Tremezzina and Bellagio.
Run the numbers
Portfolio Balance
What the next house does to the share of your wealth in property, and how fast you could sell it all.
Read next
The private market
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 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 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.