Affluent Home Buyers Are Driving up Prices in Southern European Cities
2 min
Lisbon was home to the fastest growing luxury-home prices in the first half of this year, according to a report Monday from Savills.
With gains of 4.2% in the six months through June, the Portuguese capital bested the performance of any of the other 29 prime property markets globally analysed by the property firm.
Cities in southern Europe and the Middle East saw their high-end home sectors perform best, with Lisbon followed by Amsterdam, Madrid and Athens, which all logged capital value increases above 3% over the same time. Dubai rounded out the top five with growth of 2.9%.
In southern Europe in particular, prime prices are being driven by a lack of supply, and American buyers have become a “key prospective buyer base,” Savills said, “thanks to a comparatively strong dollar and a growing interest in the lifestyle on offer.”
In the U.S., meanwhile, persistently high interest rates have impacted demand across the. housing market, and as a result, prime residential prices have fallen in three of the four U.S. cities monitored in the report, with only San Francisco seeing positive growth of 0.7% for the first half of the year.
Los Angeles ranked at the bottom of the list, with luxury prices falling roughly 4%.
Across all 30 cities analyzed by Savills, prime residential property prices “remained resilient over the first half of 2024,” recording an average growth of 0.8% and outperforming the 0.6% growth predicted for the year as a whole, the report said.
More than half (60%) of the cities recorded positive capital growth, “reflecting a level of relative confidence in the asset class,” according to Savills.
Looking ahead, “we predict an average capital value growth of 0.5% for the second half of the year, which would bring total 2024 growth to 1.3%,” said Kelcie Sellers, associate director at Savills World Research in the report.
“The ongoing supply-demand mismatch for high-end residential product is projected to fuel price growth in European cities such as Amsterdam, Lisbon and Barcelona, where 2% to 3.9% is forecast in the second half of 2024.”
This article first appeared on Mansion Global
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A five-bedroom Palo Alto home designed by Steven Ehrlich is listed for $44 million, making it the city’s most expensive listing. Built around a dramatic concrete spine, the home features four courtyards and a pool.
3 min
For years, tech entrepreneur Asher Waldfogel and his wife, Helyn MacLean, dreamed of building a modern house in Palo Alto, Calif.
The couple, however, worried about clashing with the Mediterranean-style architecture typically associated with their neighborhood of Old Palo Alto.
So they tapped architect Steven Ehrlich to create a design that paid homage to its surroundings with stucco, mahogany and titanium zinc cladding. They spent $20 million over several years building the house, completed in 2005.
Now looking to be closer to their adult daughter on the East Coast, they are putting the five-bedroom home on the market for $44 million—the most expensive listing in Palo Alto.
Waldfogel is an angel investor who co-founded Redback Networks, a telecommunications-equipment company. MacLean previously had a career in fundraising.
The couple purchased the roughly 0.4-acre site for $7.1 million in 2000 and demolished a circa-1930s Spanish Colonial home. The house they built pinwheels around a central staircase. It has 7,900 square feet of livable space, with four distinct courtyards and a pool.
A key feature of the home is a cast-in-place concrete wall, or spine, that is two stories high and about 80 feet long. “There’s a little bit of controlled chaos in what comes out of the form,” unlike a perfectly uniform surface, Waldfogel said. “If you want that, you do it in plastic.”
Waldfogel said he and his wife are thinking about the next phase of life now that their daughter is grown, although they have not decided where they will move. They also have a home in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“Right now we’re just trying to emotionally let go and decide what to do next,” he said.
Palo Alto, an epicenter of venture capital and tech startups in Silicon Valley, is home to some of the country’s biggest tech titans. Sales volume and prices are rising, with a median sale price of $3.5 million for the three months ending in August, up 5.8% year-over-year, according to real-estate brokerage Redfin.
Arthur Sharif of Sotheby’s International Realty—San Francisco Brokerage has the listing.
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