Dear IPA Friend,
If you follow, as many property investors do, where the tourist market is going, you'll be looking at the Middle East in 2008 and beyond. Tom Barber, founding director of Original Travel, says, "All the recent problems in the Middle East have actually made people more aware of the region and, rather than putting them off, they have become fascinated.
We see it kind of spreading out - people started in Dubai, then they looked over and got interested in Oman, then Jordan, then Syria, and so on." Those who follow the hotels - on the basis that they only ever open in areas of growing demand - will be doing the same. There are many luxury hotels opening in the region for the first time. In February, for example, the latest property in the Six Senses Hideaway portfolio opens at Zighy Bay in northern Oman. Original Travel predicts that Syria will become the most fashionable Middle Eastern destination. Tourists come for the history and desert scenery, flying into Aleppo and out of D amascus on new British Midland flights. And those of you who follow the airlines, etc etc etc!
Thank you to those members who replied to the Istanbul and Brno ads.
You should hear from our friend Alan very shortly, if not already.
Peter Esders at the International Law Partnership picks up today on our recent talk of Bulgarian property scams. Peter writes, "One fraud that we recently saw in Bulgaria was where the client was buying a property for one price but the developer was actually selling for a different (lower) price. The agent in the middle was not only charging the developer a commission for selling the property but also pocketing the difference for themselves! He tried to get away with it by having a contract between the developer and himself and then a separate contract between the client and himself. In this case the agent was bound to be caught out because as routine we always check with the developer how much he is actually selling for and quickly discovered that this didn't match up with what the client thought he was buying for. Funnily enough the developer wasn't happy when he found out!"
"In another case we found that the agent selling the property didn't actually have the authority to sell the property on behalf of the developer and would have disappeared with the client's deposit if he had paid it over. This was discovered when we asked for the agent to prove that he had the authority to sign the contract on behalf of the developer and he could not. Checking with the developer showed that the agent had previously had the authority to sell such properties but had fallen out with the developer some months previously. We have seen similar cases in other countries so this sort of thing is not limited to Bulgaria." So the moral of the tale is to ask someone like Peter to check for these particular scams.
We are currently updating two articles on Cyprus - yes, both sides of the border. The Financial Mirror today has some interesting stats - property transactions (in the south) are up 42 per cent this year.
There's more to come when the euro is adopted on 1 January 2008.
Peter Esders at the International Law Partnership also has some thoughts to share regarding the developing Bulgarian market. "I have stopped thinking about Bulgaria as one market and started to think of it as several different markets - all of which are very different and appeal to different people. They also all have different investment potentials.
The coast is very different from the skiing, which in turn is different from Sofia, which in turn different from the Spa resorts which are in turn different from the rural areas."
"Next year I think that we will see a sharp decline in the number of people buying on the Black Sea Coast but expect to see an increase in the number of people discovering the Spa Resorts. In fact I know one Spanish developer who has just gone into Bulgaria and who has bypassed the coast and the skiing completely and started developing a Spa resort!" Interesting stuff - and, by the by, we have a good-looking development in Sofia if you are interested. More at the weekend on that.
Turkey is certainly on the up. Antalya is today being tipped as a favourite city for international companies operating in Turkey.
According to the Treasury Undersecretariat, Turkey has 17,756 international companies in the country. Looking at these from province to province, international companies are moving away from industrial cities to tourism destinations. While there are 9,657 international companies in Istanbul, accounting for 54 per cent of the foreign companies in Turkey, there are 2,146 companies in Antalya and this accounts for 12 per cent; a figure which is rising.
Iain Maitland
Editor, International Property Alerts
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