Overseas holiday properties facts and trends

Savills Research in association with Holiday- Rentals surveyed over 1.500 overseas property owners and identified their motivations for buying property, and analysed the rents, yields and pricing trends achieved by second homes abroad in 2007. It is estimated that there are currently 425.000 UK owned overseas properties. This is an increase of 55% since 2003 and an uplift of 35,000 units in the past 12 months. Extrapolating Government data, the projected total value of UK foreign owned property reached £58billion in 2008, an increase of £5.2billion in the past 12 months. Purchasing property in an ideal holiday location was rated as the most important factor explaining why purchasers continue to buy in locations where capital growth has slowed or indeed turned negative in the last year, such as Spain. Due to the credit crisis, which is impacting global mortgage markets, it is not expected a significant increase in the volume of investment in the holiday home market over the next two years. Nonetheless, in the longer term, buyers are still optimistic about buying properties abroad, most particularly in traditional hotspots while other European destinations such as Cyprus, Greece and Turkey also feature as increasingly desirable.