Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
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Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
Read more →
Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
Read more →
Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
Read more →
Property’s Reputation As A Diversifier Is As Strong As Ever Property’s reputation as a diversifier is as strong as ever whilst using expat mortgages to support property investments. We were reminded of this late last year. We asked 500 investors why they were drawn to property investment – and the benefit of this asset class as a safety net was one of the most popular reasons cited. The responses revealed how property is seen as a go-to diversifier; investors are looking for options that are above the fray of other asset classes and indices – to bring an added level of security to their portfolios. There is, of course, much more to property than simply a second canopy in case your stocks and bonds go into free-fall. Whether your aims are long-term capital growth, or income generation (or a combination of the two), the right property investments can certainly add real value. But specifically when it comes to risk-balancing, evidence certainly suggests that property deserves its reputation as a lynch-pin of any investment portfolio. Here, we’ll unpick the reasons for this – and explain how to invest with effective portfolio diversification in mind. WHY DIVERSIFICATION STILL MATTERS As investors, we are all at the mercy of ‘events’: whether good or bad, foreseeable or completely out of the blue. Those events could affect specific markets, indices, industry sectors, entire geographic regions or individual companies. Diversification is a tried and tested risk-mitigation strategy that tries to address this. The aim is simple: to invest in a wide range of assets and asset classes to ensure that if (and when) events unfold and their associated risks arise, not all investments within the portfolio are affected the same way. It might be a familiar strategy – but is it still relevant? For one thing, “disruption” looks set to be as much of a buzzword for this year and the foreseeable future as it was for 2016. While disruption can present opportunities (think tech stocks, for instance), the start-of-year outlooks for 2017 are laden with a longer-than-usual roll-call of potential disruptive headwinds. A possible move to protectionism in the US, uncertainty over how long China will maintain its stimulative policies, the ongoing Brexit saga…the list goes on. Diversification might be the oldest strategy in the book – but it’s actually more relevant than ever. WHY UK PROPERTY? There are lots of sound reasons for including property as
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Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
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Is the global property bubble ready to burst? Residential global property has arguably been the most exciting investment of the past eight or nine years, but lately the fun has been draining away for expat mortgage holders. House and apartment prices have been driven sky high by rock bottom interest rates and there are growing signs that they cannot go any higher. Affordability has been stretched as far as it can go. Buyers are reluctant to part with their money at these levels. The days of double-digit annual house price increases appear to be over. The question now is whether the market is merely slowing, or whether it could go sharply into reverse. Is this a bubble, and if so, could it burst? Nothing lasts forever. London was the world’s No 1 property hot spot, but lately the luxury end of the market has slipped. Completed sales of newly-built flats in prime central London areas fell 41.4 per cent across 2016, according to figures from London Central Portfolio, while average prices for new builds also fell 8.7 per cent to £1.9 million (Dh9m). The very top end, for houses worth £5m or more, was worst affected with a 57 per cent fall in new build sales. However, prices across prime central London still rose 3.7 per cent, once sales of existing stock were also taken into account. The pattern of slowdown can be seen around the world in Knight Frank’s latest Prime Global Cities Index, which tracks the performance of luxury residential prices across key global cities for the period of March 2016 to March 2017. Its survey for the first quarter of this year showed that global property hot spots remain, with luxury prices in major Chinese cities Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou up on average 26.3 per cent, while in the Canadian hot spot of Toronto, prices grew 22.2 per cent. In Seoul, prices grew 17.6 per cent, Sydney and Stockholm registered price rises of 10.7 per cent, and Berlin, Melbourne, Vancouver and Cape Town grew between 7 and 9 per cent. However, outside this buoyant top 12, price growth was in the low single digits, with a third of the 41 cities featured suffering a drop. Worst performers were Istanbul (minus 8.3 per cent), Moscow (minus 7.3 per cent), Zurich (minus 7 per cent), London (minus 6.4 per cent) and Taipei (minus 6.3 per cent). Taimur Khan, a
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Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
Read more →
Premier Expat Mortgages specializes in securing expat mortgages, expat life insurance, expat secured loans and commercial mortgages for expatriates worldwide. Our dedicated team ensures seamless transactions and competitive rates for expats purchasing property overseas or refinancing existing mortgages.
Read more →
Capital Gains Tax changes for expatriates and overseas buyers brings the UK in line with other global property markets The UK government published draft legislation that detailed changes to Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on the sale of properties for overseas and expatriate investors. This brings changes for the UK in line with other property markets and aligns overseas and expatriate property investors the same as UK resident home-owners. From 6 April 2015, non-resident UK property investors will be charged on gains made from the sale of their property of between 18% and 28%, this is the same rate as resident home-owners in the UK. The UK government has deemed any UK property owner who spends less than 90 nights in their property to be a non-resident investor and CGT will also be charged on off-plan properties. Other key points arising from the draft legislation are provided below. The changes mean that non-resident UK property owners will need to consider obtaining a valuation of their property. We work with a number of valuers to assist you in obtaining a recent valuation should you need one. If you need to clarify any points relating to the changes to the CGT legislation, we advise property investors using expat mortgages to seek tax advice from a UK tax specialist with knowledge in this area. Who will be affected by this new legislation? From 6 April 2015, CGT will be imposed on disposals of residential UK property by non-resident individuals, trustees, estates and close companies. Off-plan properties will also be treated as fully completed residential properties, so if a non-resident individual re-sells a property before the completion of a project then they will be liable to CGT on any gains arising after 6 April 2015. The government has not extended the CGT charge to non-resident institutional investors disposing of shares or units in a collective investment scheme, provided they are ‘diversely held’ and not a mere vehicle used by private individuals to avoid the new tax. Non-resident institutional investors will be subject to a ‘narrowly controlled company’ test and a and a ‘genuine diversity of ownership’ test to ensure individuals are not transferring their interest in UK residential property to a non-resident company in order to escape the tax. What is the rate of CGT for individuals? The tax rate for non-resident individuals will be the same as the rates applicable to UK resident individuals.
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