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.
Your result
The Legacy Builder
Buys the house the family will gather in for fifty years, and reads the inheritance rules before the floor plan.
You buy for the grandchildren. A Tuscan estate with a chapel, a farmhouse on the Sonnberg, a villa on the Alster: a house large enough for three generations at Christmas and stable enough to be the fixed point of a family. You want the ten-year rule, the low annual tax and a jurisdiction where succession is predictable.
What works for you
You hold longest of all, which means you capture every cycle and pay the exit tax once, if at all. Legacy builders are also the buyers whom families choose to sell to, because they will keep the house as it is.
What to watch
Succession law and the burden on the heirs. A French estate splits by force of law; an Italian one needs the consents renewed; a German one is clean after ten years but the heirs pay to keep it. Take succession advice in the jurisdiction before you sign, and budget the maintenance for the children.
Structure
A family holding or a foundation where the jurisdiction allows one, with the succession rules of the country of the house modelled against those of the country of the family. The exit instrument with the German and Austrian profiles shows why the jurisdiction matters.
The hotspots that fit
Tuscany
Estates in Chianti, the Val d'Orcia, the hills above Florence and Lucca.
Hamburg
Harvestehude, Rotherbaum, Uhlenhorst, the Elbchaussee and Blankenese.
Kitzbühel
The town, Reith, Aurach, Going and the Bichlalm side.
Munich
Bogenhausen, Lehel, Schwabing, Grünwald and the lakes.
Run the numbers
Holding Costs
What a house costs every year you own it, from property tax to the gardener, in each hotspot.
Read next
The method
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 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 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.