Luxury sells in rising global market

House prices are on the rise in most countries around the world – and wealthy buyers are on the move

DO YOU fancy a castle in Italy that comes with 11 bathrooms, 14 bedrooms, a private chapel – and a prison? If you have €10 million, this medieval pile – a complex with five buildings, on nearly 20 acres overlooking Lake Trasimeno in Umbria – could be yours.

If you have only €3.5 million to spend on a castle, there’s a 15-bedroom, 15-bathroom château in Picardy in northern France on 81 acres that includes a river and two lakes. A penthouse overlooking Central Park on East 87th street in New York costs $19,750,000 (€14.3m), while a bungalow in a “mind, body, soul” resort surrounded by mangroves in Malaysia costs from just $203,000 (€146,059).

International real estate agent Knight Frank has just published its Private View brochure with pictures of luxury homes aimed at wealthy buyers who, even in times of recession it seems, are always with us.

“The issue is not a shortage of ready and willing buyers – like beautiful people, the types of property sold by the firm are always in demand,” the agency says.

The market for prime residential property – for buyers and sellers – is now truly global, it says: even if there is a property slump in one part of the world, there’s a boom in another.

So while the European property market is still weak, house prices in the Asia Pacific region – principally China, Hong Kong and Singapore – rose by 14.1 per cent in the past year. Prices in South Africa’s and Canada’s heated housing markets rose by 14.8 per cent and 13.5 per cent respectively, and Canada may be entering “bubble” territory, says the survey.

Indeed, all the signs are that house prices in most markets around the world are on the rise. The Economist magazine’s just-published global house price survey, the most up-to-date, shows that prices continued to fall in only five of 22 countries in the third quarter of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009.

Property prices in Knight Frank’s global house price index rose by 3.9 per cent in the second quarter of this year, the second consecutive quarter that average annual growth for all global locations has risen.

In both indexes, Singapore led the way with price rises of 23 per cent in the third quarter and 37 per cent in the second.

Ireland is bottom of The Economist index, with a 17 per cent fall in the third quarter; in Knight Frank’s, its second from the bottom, again, with a 17 per cent fall in house prices in the second quarter of 2010 over the same period in 2009. (Only Estonia, with a fall of 31.5 per cent, fared worse.)

Irish people seem less likely to be among the “super-rich buyers” that Knight Frank cultivates so carefully. (In a spread headed “The Matchmakers” laid out on a background of red roses, the brochure waxes romantic on how it matches people with money to their dream home to create “property marriages made in heaven”.)

But despite the weakness in the European property market, most buyers of luxury homes come from Europe, followed by buyers from Asia. And the most popular properties are in established European locations such as the south of France, Tuscany, the Algarve and the French and Swiss Alps.

A browse through Private View is a bit of a tonic, full as it is of homes in places where the sun always shines and where every property boasts a view. Over half the properties featured are in Europe, and include classic haunts of the wealthy, from the UK to Switzerland to the Algarve.

A listed house in Knightsbridge, for example, comes with a guest bedroom suite, staff bedroom suite and beautiful reception rooms – it costs £9.75 million (€11.17m); in Vevey in Switzerland, apartments with views of Lake Geneva are being sold off plans from (CHF4,365,000 to CHF25,696,500 (€3.19m-€18.8m).

In the US, there’s a 929sq m (10,000sq ft) renovated summer house in East Hampton, New York, for $25 million (€18.1m); in Barbados, a villa (built to your choice from nine designs) at the Apes Hill Club from $3.5 million (€2.53m); and in South Africa, a Cape Cod-style home in a hidden cove in Cape Town for ZAR22m (€2.26m).