Trying To Buy In Europe

[gamavor]

Sunday Times (London)

August 10, 2003, Sunday

 

Trying to buy in Europe

 

by Rod Liddle

 

 

Bored to the point of stupefaction by the endless monkeying over the

sale of our house - and convinced now that Wiltshire has become a

sort of Belgravia, except with sheep - we are urgently exploring the

possibility of relocating abroad. As everybody knows, abroad is dirt

cheap.

 

Except, of course, that we're a bit late. We've missed France - all

of it, even the horrible ugly bits where they hate us even more than

they do in Paris. And we've missed Spain and Portugal. Italy's been

bought up and Croatia got sold to the English middle classes two

years ago: Dubrovnik, apparently, is the new Guildford.

 

Where's left? I asked a grinning real estate expert. Well, he said,

Bulgaria, maybe, if you hurry. And Armenia and Nagorno-Artsax. Very

beautiful, if you dodge the bullets. And central heating is

unnecessary in Kazakhstan, what with the radiation.

 

So, disillusioned already, we head for what has been, traditionally,

the most expensive sector of Europe. To wit: Switzerland, Germany,

Austria and northern Italy.

 

And it's a good move because the English have stayed away. There's a

massive, beautiful and mountainous swathe of Europe as yet unpolluted

by the Quentins and Gemmas setting up their bloody olive presses or

pretending to be experts in viticulture.

 

And as a result there are no estate agents anywhere. There are no

surveyors. There are no property pages or witless television

programmes about how to sell your house and buy another one.

 

And it's then that the dreadful truth strikes home - that we, the

English, are the only people in Europe and perhaps the only people in

the world who have this burning, obsessive acquisitiveness about

buying bigger and better houses.

 

Everybody else just lives somewhere and doesn't worry about it.

 

I tried to find the estate agent in a stunning - and large - north

Austrian ski resort which had twice hosted the Winter Olympics. There

was but one man, tucked away on the third floor of an apartment

building down a back alley, no pictures of property for sale, no

adverts. His office was shut four days per week. And, crucially, he

had nothing whatsoever for sale. Very, very rarely houses come up for

sale, usually when somebody dies. Couldn't even estimate the price.

There's no market, you see. The overwhelming majority of Austrians

rent. What's wrong with renting?

 

The same was true, pretty much, 80 miles south in the Alto Adige,

which, these days, falls under the auspices of the Italian

government, much to the local population's distress and

embarrassment. There was a two-bedroom apartment at Euro 700,000

(Pounds 495,000): people don't buy properties around here - ski

companies buy them and then rent them out.

 

We found a semi-detached villa going cheap in a suburb of Munich,

though. Looked ideal. Except you have to remember that my girlfriend

objected to the last house we viewed in Wiltshire because it

overlooked a graveyard. And the semi detached villa was in the suburb

of Dachau. So we passed on that one. It seemed somehow to contravene

the golden rule of location, location, location.

 

I took a lot of anti-depressants before crossing the border into

Switzerland. But they weren't powerful enough. The cleanliness of the

place and the punctilious nature of the natives tipped me into a

slough of despair.

 

I don't think I'm built to live abroad. Weird things happen to my

body when I'm away from England for too long. Quite unaccountably, by

the time we reached Geneva, my ears had begun to smell. I've never

known that happen before. Any thought of scouring the city for estate

agents dissolved and we flew home. Back, beaten and remorseful, to Mr

Savage the estate agent and more weeks of vacillation and indecision.

 

 

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg72620.html

 

 

PS: Remember guys what I told you. Five years ago a regular apartment in Yerevan was sold for 5K, right now is 20K. When the "horde" of aging American-Armenians rediscover Armenia the price will go up and up.