Attendees at today’s WTM Vision Conference Rimini will hear how the rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones by consumers around the globe is creating a new business environment for the travel and tourism industry.
Euromonitor International will present research showing how smartphones will become a significant transactional channel as customers become more comfortable using their devices for purchases as well as research.
According to Euromonitor, global online travel sales accounted for US$589 billion in 2013, amounting to 25% of total travel and tourism sales. Online sales are expected to grow faster than the total travel industry, growing 10% year-on-year and reaching US$827 billion by 2017.
And in 2017, 45% of the world’s population or 3.3 billion people will be internet users, with smartphones the most popular way of getting online.
Euromonitor also noted some changes to consumer behaviour as a result of the proliferation of devices and wider internet penetration.
It suggested that “online and mobile developments have enabled [consumers] to increasingly bypass traditional distribution, which has helped to drive growth in new business models and, particularly, peer-to-peer”.
The dominance of portable devices over fixed-line computers for internet access has led to the emergence of multi-screen consumer. Euromonitor refers to Google research which identifies sequential and simultaneous usage trends.
“In the case of sequential usage, smartphones are generally the starting point for consumers, who then move to PC, tablet or TV to continue their search for information on travel destinations and services, and possibly make their travel bookings. In the case of simultaneous usage, consumers will typically make a search on brands watched in TD advertisements through their smartphone or tablet,” Euromonitor said.
World Travel Market, Senior Director, Simon Press said: “The evidence is overwhelming. As the internet population grows and the adoption of devices increases, significant new consumer trends are emerging. Events such as the WTM Vision Conferences are helping the global travel industry understand these changes and find ways to thrive in the new economy”.
Greek property prices continue to fall. Nominal apartment prices are estimated to have declined on average by 7.3 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2014, according to the Bank of Greece, while Knight Frank’s latest Global House Price Index ranked the market as the second worst-performing in the world.
Low prices, though, are bringing buyers back to Greece, as bargain hunters from other countries step up their demand.
Overseas investment in Greek property doubled in the first half of 2014 compared to the same six months in 2013, according to new figures from the Bank of Greece. The data, reported by Athens daily newspaper ekathimerini, shows that €117.4 million was invested in Greek real estate between January and June 2014, compared to just €60.3 million in H1 2013.
Interest has showed signs of climbing throughout 2014. Greece climbed up one place to become the 12th most popular destination on TheMoveChannel.com in August, accounting for 1.92 per cent of enquiries. In April 2014, Greece entered the top 10 countries for the first time in seven months, as the country’s share of property enquiries on the portal trebled in Q1 2014.
Realtor.com has also seen interest climb in Greek property. Italy was the most searched-for country on the US portal,according to its latest report, followed by Jamaica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. While this remained the same as the previous month, Greece entered its top 10 destinations for the first time.
Demand is driven by holiday homes, says ekathimerini, noting that their average value has fallen more than 40 per cent since the financial crisis first struck the struggling economy. Now, though, as tourism fuels a gradual economic improvement, investment is rising: the millions injected into real estate in the first half of 2014 eclipsed the total €113 million invested in the whole of 2012.
Author – Dan Johnson
Foreigners doubled their investment in Greek property, mostly holiday homes, in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2013, Bank of Greece data show.
Bad weather forced Ryanair to cancel their flights on Sunday. About 40 Liverpool-bound passengers are stranded on a Greek island and are possibly informed that might not get out of Greece before next month. The stranded passengers reportedly lost their composure when the budget air carrier responded indifferently.
The passengers at the Corfu International Airport claimed that they were left in dark about the real incident. According to the reports, there are a few heart patients and the passengers had to sit at the airport for almost 12 hours a day.
In a statement made by the Irish budget airline, a spokesperson said that the adverse weather conditions forced the cancellation of two flights to Manchester and Oslo Rygge on Sunday. He also said that the affected passengers were offered accomodation and refreshment vouchers.
Ryanair said that it is looking for a favourable weather condition to schedule additional flights for the stranded passengers and will soon contact the upset airline passengers.
Southern Europe’s cash-strapped governments are courting wealthy Chinese homebuyers, seeking to bolster their battered real estate markets by offering visas to those who purchase prime properties.
Cyprus, Greece and Portugal are providing resident permits to foreign buyers, while Spain is about to adopt a similar measure. The chance to purchase a home at depressed prices in southern Europe and gain what’s known as a golden visa is mostly being sold to Chinese investors, according to brokers.
“Property is what really attracts China’s rich,” said Nuno Durao, a founding partner at Irglux, a unit of real estate agency Fine & Country, in Cascais, Portugal. “With just half a million euros, high-net-worth Chinese investors will get a good return on their property investment and at the same time enjoy a handful of EU benefits they don’t have in China.”
Southern Europe is the latest target for rich Chinese homebuyers, who have been snapping up properties from Vancouver to London since 2010 as their wealth swells and China’s government steps up a three-year campaign to cool home prices there. Cyprus, Portugal and Greece are hot spots for the newly affluent Asians, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd. (SFUN), owner of China’s biggest real estate website and an organizer of overseas purchasing tours for Chinese seeking cheap properties and a chance to live in the EU.
Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Residential homes and hotels stand along the shoreline in Limassol, Cyprus.
Fast-Track Process
Greece and Cyprus offer fast-track permit processes for purchases of at least 250,000 euros ($335,000) and 300,000 euros, respectively. Portugal’s program has a minimum price of 500,000 euros.
While some wealthier European countries also grant special resident visas for investors, most require larger outlays and may not involve real estate. The U.K., for instance, grants special visasto individuals with at least 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) to invest in the country.
Those policies aren’t as attractive to wealthy Chinese as the incentives being offered in southern Europe, said Edmund Zhao, a real estate investor from China who spent 700,000 euros on an apartment in the coastal resort town of Cascais after arriving in Lisbon in April.
Zhao said he expects to receive his resident permit this month, which requires him to stay in Portugal for a minimum of seven days during the first year and 14 days every two years during the duration of his five-year visa. The visa will also let Zhao send any children he may have in the future to Europe’s most prestigious schools, he said.
Photographer: Mario Proenca/Bloomberg
Residential housing and other buildings stand on the bank of the Douro river in Oporto, Portugal.
‘Love It’
“I want to move there with my wife and parents as soon as possible,” Zhao said in a telephone interview from Hangzhou, eastern China, where the 38-year-old lives with his wife. “I love it.”
Buyers from mainland China typically look for immigration opportunities in southern Europe for their families because of the drop in real estate prices, said Wang Ning, a manager in the international property department at SouFun in Beijing. Some visas allow buyers to live and travel freely within Europe’s borderless Schengen Area, made up of 26 countries fromFinland in the north to Greece in the south.
While some Chinese buy a place as an investment and don’t live there, most are getting homes for personal use or to send their children to schools there, Wang said. Home prices in southern Europe are attractive compared with China — 300,000 euros buys a 200-square-meter (2,150-square-foot) villa facing the sea, said Wang. That amount buys a 68-square-meter apartment in centralShanghai, according to SouFun.
Euro’s Depreciation
Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis has also meant a depreciation of the euro, making real estate more affordable to Chinese buyers. The currency fell about 17 percent against China’s yuan from the beginning of 2010 through the end of July.
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Residential property is seen in Glyfada, the coastal resort on the Aegean Sea near Athens, Greece.
Searches for Portuguese properties on Juwai.com rose more than threefold from January through April, said Andrew Taylor, co-chief executive officer of the Chinese real estate website aimed at international home shoppers. Interest in Cyprus, Spain and Greece increased as much as 108 percent in that time, Taylor said in an e-mailed response to questions.
Cyprus is already “booming with Chinese investors,” said Nikolas Michalias, a property valuer at G&P Lazarou in Cyprus who spends half the year in China promoting golden visas tied to real estate investments. “Every day there are more than 20 Chinese nationals landing in Cyprus to search for property.”
The island nation this year followed Greece, Ireland and Portugal in requesting emergency aid from the EU and the International Monetary Fund.
Diverging Economies
Though the euro area’s economy came out of a record-long recession in the second quarter, parts of southern Europe remain stuck in the slump, with more than half of young people in Spain and Greece jobless. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires in China rose 4 percent from the previous 12 months to 2.8 million, the Hurun Research Institute said in June. Last month, new home prices rose the most since January 2011 in the Asian nation’s four major cities on speculation the government will refrain from imposing tighter curbs.
In Spain, where the collapse of a decade-long property boom has sent home prices down about 30 percent, lawmakers are set to approve a measure that will allow investors to apply for a renewable two-year residence permit if they spend at least 500,000 euros on a property, purchase 2 million euros or more of government debt, put at least 1 million euros in a Spanish bank or pay that much to acquire stakes in Spanish companies.
Rapid Response
Spain received “almost an immediate response” from Chinese investors when it announced the visa proposal last year, said Pia Arrieta Morales, a director at DM Properties, a Christies International affiliate in the seaside resort of Marbella.
Demand from Chinese buyers for golden visas is just beginning to surface in places like Greece, which passed its law in April. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras visited China in May and announced that non-Europeans who invest in the property market could gain the right to live in Greece.
A Chinese man became the first foreigner to benefit from the program earlier this month, Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported Aug. 13. Local real estate company BuildUp said the deal was signed on Aug. 8, and the firm is working with a Chinese company to promote Greece’s property market, according to Kathimerini.
“The visa legislation in Greece is still very recent and has so far had very little impact on the real estate market,” said Ioanna Plakokefalou, general manager at Hellenic Realty in Athens. “While we had some inquiries from Chinese and also Russian investors, their interest will depend on the political and economic situation.”
Portuguese Villas
Alison Buechner Hojbjerg, a director at Quinta Properties, a real estate agency selling luxury villas in Portugal’s southern Quinta do Lago resort, said the firm hasn’t had as much success as hoped from the golden-visa program.
“Those kinds of investors may be looking to buy cheaper properties than the ones we are selling,” she said.
A total of 102 golden visas have been granted in Portugal, mostly to Chinese investors, since the program began last year, according to data from the Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service. Brokers like Luis Hortelao with Re/Max in Lisbon say that even with a 500,000 euro minimum, one of the few barriers to more Chinese homebuyers coming to Portugal is language.
“My Chinese clients often come to Portugal and hire a translator,” Hortelao said. “They know exactly what they want: a modern property to rent out during their absence and a visa to travel in Europe.”
Chris Liem, owner and principal of Engel & Voelkers in Hong Kong, said Portuguese real estate offers a better alternative than property in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.
The benefits of buying in Portugal “far outweigh the investment costs,” Liem said. “Particularly for high net-worth Hong Kong and mainland Chinese who are looking for higher economic returns, a stable investment, a lifestyle investment and easy access to EU benefits.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Henrique Almeida in Lisbon at halmeida5@bloomberg.net
Last year, new overseas investment by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of China unleashed a wave of outbound investments by major Chinese real estate companies.
Under this new policy, going into effect October 6, investment projects abroad no longer require approval from the ministry – save for those in industries and countries deemed sensitive by the Chinese government.1
Not surprisingly, astute developers have been watching policy changes closely to capitalise on such new guidelines.Investments by Chinese developers have charted a 17% increase since the NDRC increased the threshold last December from $100 million to $1 billion for overseas investments required to obtain approval.2
One such developer is Shanghai-based Fosun Group, which has taken bold steps in recent years to steadily expand overseas – spending over $3.7 billion on foreign acquisitions since 2010.9
Fosun has undergone its fair share of successes, challenges and fierce competition, but they’ve only grown from strength to strength. With the new policy going into effect today, the world is its oyster.
Sources: 1. Mingtiandi.com; 2. Jones Lang LaSalle; 3. Bloomberg; 4. WSJ; 5. Financial Times; 6. Financial Times; 7. The Australian; 8. Mingtiandi.com; 9. Bloomberg; 10. WSJ
Did you know? The renminbi (RMB) literally translates to mean “the people’s currency”, while the yuan(CNY) means “dollar” in Chinese.
What’s the difference between the Renminbi and Yuan?
Renminbi is China’s official currency
Yuan is a unit in the renminbi currency
Hence, it would be incorrect in Chinese to say something costs 100 renminbi – it should be 100 yuan instead. Just think of the pound vs. sterling.
However, most locals in China more commonly use the colloquial term of kuài (块) instead, which means “piece” – similar to “buck” and “quid”. So you can say “100 kuài”, which means “100 pieces of money”.
Russian courts could get the green light to seize foreign assets on Russian territory under a draft law intended as a response to Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.
Vacation rental portals have become the most massively used tools among the people who use internet for booking their vacation homes. These have nearly replaced the older methods like directories and classifieds. Therefore, you are required to concentrate deeply on how you post an ad about your vacation rentals propertyon online booking portals.
Most often a visitor will see ad headlines and decide if they want to view the complete description,amenities, rental conditions and pictures of your property. However, many homeowners tend to make mistakes in writing their ad headline which directly affects the amount of visibility they get on their listings. Mentioned below Tips are two very commonly made, but easy-to-avoid mistakes.
Specifying the type of home you own in the headline
A suggestion on not mentioning the home type may sound weird at first, but it has clear logic and research behind it. This is because many a time people have misconceptions or biases about a particular style of house. For example, some folks feel condos are less attractive than bungalows or villas. Others may feel that an independent villa may be offering fewer facilities than a house in an apartment building. In most cases these are just misconceptions. The only way you can make things clear for your prospective clients is by demonstrating how lovely your home is irrespective of its built-style. But this is only possible when people click on your ad and see all that you have posted about your house. So it is a wise choice to leave out the house-type from the ad headline. Try doing this and see for yourself the difference in the amount of traffic your web site receives after it.
Keep your Vacation Rental Calendar Up to Date
The most important part of your listing is your rental calendar. Make it easy: an updated calendar leads to more inquiries and booking requests. There are two options to update your calendar: You can manually change or update your rental’s booked dates regularly, or sync it with an existing calendar by importing the data from websites like Lodgify, Bookingsync and other similar sites.
Mentioning the number of bedrooms in the listings
Writing the number of bedrooms you have in your vacations home is another sure-shot remedy to drastically reduce the number of visitors that click on your listings’ link. Your audience is narrowed down if you give too much information in the ad headline itself. People visiting the listings may be more inclined towards a house that comfortably sleeps more people, but it is also possible that they compromise on this part if they really like a particular house a lot. It is more important for you to show prospective clients how comfortable and unique your home is than specifying how many bedrooms it contains. So even if the number of bedrooms in your house does not match the expectations of a particular visitor, they will at least have visited your page and may refer your house to another friend, or may be use it later when bedrooms are not a constraint.
Remember that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media are necessary technical step that makes your ad visible to a larger audience. So it makes sense to gain some SEO knowledge and write effective descriptions and headlines that get you noticed. The higher the traffic your web site gets, more are the chances that you will be able to enhance your customer base.
A spot with the beautiful tranquility of the mountains or the ocean outside your front door can be just the weekend re-charge you need in your life, but coming up with the money to finance or buy a vacation homeisn’t easy.
If you don’t have cash on hand to buy a second home outright, refinancing your primary residence might help you get the cash flow you need.
Just make sure you know the finer points before you start building your new skiwear or swimwear collection.
The Refinancing Process
In order to get the funds you need for your vacation home, you’ll have to do a cash-out refinance loan. This means taking on a new mortgage which is greater than the amount you currently owe on your house.
You’ll keep the difference between the amount you owe on your original mortgage and the amount of your new loan, which you can use to buy—or put a down payment on—a vacation home.
Remember, when you refinance, you are applying for a whole new loan. That means going through the mortgage process again, complete with credit checks, income verification and debt-to-income ratio evaluation, all of which will affect your new interest rate.
Just because you have a home does not mean you have the option of refinancing it. Several factors can make you ineligible to refinance:
Bad credit
Having owned your primary home for less than 12 months
A poor debt-to-income ratio
A poor loan-to-value ratio (you want to have yours at 80%, at least)
To help you land your dream vacation home, try a pre-approval service like the one featured on the realtor.com® individual listings page.
By checking the box that says, “I want to get pre-approved by a lender” you’ll be connected with up to three lenders right away.
Consider Taxes When Buying a Vacation Home
How you choose to use your vacation home can affect your taxes, which may make juggling two properties more difficult.
For example, if you only plan on the occasional weekend away, it may seem like a good idea to rent out your vacation home part of the year.
However, under the tax rules for rented properties, if you use your second home as a rental, you’ll only be able to say in the home 14 days—or 10% of the total days the property is rented out.
If you would rather use it as a personal residence, a special tax rule allows you to rent out the home for 14 days without having to report that income to the IRS.
This could be a good idea to help with all those new monthly expenses.
Other Considerations Before Buying a Vacation Home
A vacation home is a big investment, and refinancing isn’t cheap. Lenders are more cautious about risking money for second home mortgages, so don’t be surprised if the loan for your vacation home isn’t as good as the deal for your first mortgage.
But that’s not all you should be ready for.
Follow these tips so you won’t get caught off guard:
Get a thorough inspection done. If the home was used as a vacation destination previously, the owner may not have kept it up-to-date.
It’s a good idea to only refinance if you can get a lower interest rate. That way, you will free up extra cash you can use to fund your vacation home’s mortgage and down payment.
Since this is your second mortgage, your debt-to-income ratio should generally be capped at 36%.
You will probably need a down payment of 20% to 35% for conventional mortgages—and even higher for luxury homes.
Interest rates for a second home can be a bit higher than those for primary home purchases.
Unless you buy the vacation home outright, you will need enough money to cover the mortgageson two homes. Make sure you have enough monthly income to do so.
Buy2Greece.com 