Wealthy Chinese snap up homes in Southern Europe as governments offer visas for buying
[a real boom in Chinatown's]
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg NewsVillas in Cyprus. Cyprus is already “booming with Chinese investors,” said Nikolas Michalias, a property valuer at G&P Lazarou in Cyprus who spends half the year in China promoting golden visas tied to real estate investments.
Southern Europe’s cash-strapped governments are courting wealthy Chinese homebuyers, seeking to bolster their battered real estate markets by offering visas to those who purchase prime properties.
Cyprus, Greece and Portugal are providing resident permits to foreign buyers, while Spain is about to adopt a similar measure. The chance to purchase a home at depressed prices in southern Europe and gain what’s known as a golden visa is mostly being sold to Chinese investors, according to brokers.
“Property is what really attracts China’s rich,” said Nuno Durao, a founding partner at Irglux, a unit of real estate agency Fine & Country, in Cascais, Portugal. “With just half a million euros, high-net-worth Chinese investors will get a good return on their property investment and at the same time enjoy a handful of EU benefits they don’t have in China.”
Southern Europe is the latest target for rich Chinese homebuyers, who have been snapping up properties from Vancouver to London since 2010 as their wealth swells and China’s government steps up a three-year campaign to cool home prices there. Cyprus, Portugal and Greece are hot spots for the newly affluent Asians, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd., owner of China’s biggest real estate website and an organizer of overseas purchasing tours for Chinese seeking cheap properties and a chance to live in the EU.
Fast-Track Process
Greece and Cyprus offer fast-track permit processes for purchases of at least 250,000 euros (US$335,000) and 300,000 euros, respectively. Portugal’s program has a minimum price of 500,000 euros.
While some wealthier European countries also grant special resident visas for investors, most require larger outlays and may not involve real estate. The U.K., for instance, grants special visas to individuals with at least 1-million pounds (US$1.6-million) to invest in the country.
Those policies aren’t as attractive to wealthy Chinese as the incentives being offered in southern Europe, said Edmund Zhao, a real estate investor from China who spent 700,000 euros on an apartment in the coastal resort town of Cascais after arriving in Lisbon in April.
Zhao said he expects to receive his resident permit this month, which requires him to stay in Portugal for a minimum of seven days during the first year and 14 days every two years during the duration of his five-year visa. The visa will also let Zhao send any children he may have in the future to Europe’s most prestigious schools, he said.
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