The latest A Place in the Sun magazine (March 08) is on the newsagents stands in the UK and the main feature article is entitled:
Top 20 - The UK’s favourite overseas property destinations - Our Readers decide.
The big question is did Albania make it into the Readers top 20?
Well to be blunt, No.
It did however get a mention in the best of the rest:
Many people coming to “A Place in the Sun Live show” in Birmingham were considering a property purchase for investment purposes, and many of the countries of interest didn’t make it onto our chart. These included Albania, Brazil, Slovakia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania - all emerging markets, and favourites with investors rather than second-home buyers.
The survey had been conducted at the live show in Birmingham in September 2007 where 469 visitors had been canvassed for their choices.
Albanian Property starting to emerge at shows?
The interest in Albanian property is definitely starting to grow and there were indeed a reasonable number of exhibitors at the Birmingham show marketing them, though non we saw exclusively so. One exhibitor we spoke to told us that for every enquiry they had about Bulgaria they were getting two or three for Albania.
Despite the growing number of investors enquiring about Albanian property, interest is still at an early stage. Our view is that whilst Albania is not in the top 20 your going to stand a better chance of buying a property at a good price as one of those pioneering investors who are less phased by the inherent risk associated with an emerging market.
Supply & Demand - Basic economic rules
What we think is reasonably certain is that once Albania does make it into the top 20 you can kiss the bargain prices goodbye and the best opportunities to make a quick capital gain will have evaporated. This is quite simply driven by basic economics of increasing demand leading to increasing price.
Indeed many property agents are drawing parallels between their expectations for Albania with what they saw happen in Bulgaria. Back in 2003 before Bulgaria had broken into the top 20, a front line coastal property overlooking the sea would cost less than €650 per sqm. Four years later and after a period of high demand you would be extremely hard pressed to find such a property at anywhere near that price now.
So who did make the Top 20 then?
Well if you want to know that you’ll have to pop out to the newsagent and buy a copy of the magazine for yourself. If you are a real cheapskate you could just go read it in Smiths for free instead.
The next A Place in the Sun Live show where you may find Albanian Property for sale is in Manchester between February 29th - March 1st and you can get 2 entry tickets for the price of one if you book early on their website.
3 comments ↓
If you’ve read the Bulgaria section of the Place in the Sun magazine, £1 billion has been but into Bulgarian property buy British buyers.
Anything close to this in Albania whould put prices through the roof! I look at Bulgaria and wish I’d invested 4 or 5 years ago, and now I have that chance in Albania.
Christopher you may well be right and prices in Albania are certainly considerably lower than in Bulgaria at present.
However there are some very real lessons to be learnt from peoples experiences in Bulgaria that should influence your decision making process of ‘what’ and ‘where’ to buy. Watch out for a series of future blog posts on this very subject.
I work with a major UK/USA investment fund in London and can tell you that we have made significant investments throughout the Balkans (except Albania) and received way above our expectations in terms of returns.
Recently we visited Albania for the first time for 12 days, without announcing who we were and came away with a solid understanding of exactly what we want to do there. I can tell you that our Board have, as of the beginning of May, passed approval for the formation of an initial US $50m New Private Equity Fund specifically for projects in Albania… why?
Because we know we will make more money in Albania than any of the other countries we have invested in previously.
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