The London property market is in decline partly because large numbers of American citizens, who two years ago accounted for 60 per cent of tenancies of rented property in central London, have either lost their jobs in the City or else have taken fright in the face of the terrorist threat. It is not all bad news in the property world, however. Real-estate agents in Finland and New Zealand could not be happier. American ex-pats, more used to life in the cosmopolitan districts of London and Paris, have discovered a taste for living in the world’s backwaters.
Pick up a copy of the Offshore Real Estate Quarterly, the bible of the chronically worried American, and you are transported to a world where survivalist freakery meets the swish language of property marketing. To give a flavour from an article on the delights of relocating to Patagonia: ‘Where will the smart money and talent go when the first world comes down crashing in a wave of panic selling, mass unemployment, foreclosures, hyperinflation, a suspended constitution, martial law, closed banks, federal prisons filling up fast with some of your neighbours, a major war or two?’
Many might suspect it won’t be going to Argentina, where many of those things have already come to pass, but never mind.
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