Saturday, April 28, 2012

The rich have no country

An elite group of the world’s “stateless super-rich” is growing, and transcending geographical boundaries to purchase properties in major cities across the globe. With no strong ties to specific countries, these individuals lead nomadic, season-driven lives. Their choice of where to live at any one time is based on that location’s climate, their children’s education, tax constraints or which of their friends they want to lunch with on any particular day. This increasingly global lifestyle has led to the stateless super-rich buying a larger portion of the world’s most expensive homes as they look to park their wealth in perceived havens. On average they own four to five properties, usually consisting of two in their country of principal residence, one in a “global city” such as London, Paris or New York, and a holiday home in a hot climate – or one in the Alps.

“The more money you have, the more rootless you become because everything is possible,”
says Jeremy Davidson, a property consultant who specialises in properties that cost £10m or more in the most sought-after postcodes in London. “I have clients who wake up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go to Venice for lunch.’ If you’ve got that sort of money the world becomes a very small place. They tend to have a diminished sense of place, of where their roots are,” he says.

 Research for the Financial Times by Knight Frank shows that foreign buyers now dominate sales of “super-prime” homes – typically defined as the top 5 per cent of the most valuable properties – in the world’s major cities.

“I am not surprised that these top-end markets are so international in terms of their buyers, the reality is the super-rich who buy these properties live increasingly global lifestyles,”
says Liam Bailey, head of research at Knight Frank. “The super-prime market wouldn’t exist without a global market – it only really got going in the past 15 to 20 years as Russian money poured into London and Monaco.”

Commentators say it is hard to know what further impact this dominance of the international rich will have in the coming years, but many believe some cities have already lost the strong “community feel” and public-spiritedness they once had as more and more properties are owned by people with multiple homes worldwide.

There is a lack of integration between the incoming stateless super-rich and the communities into which they are buying. “Some foreign nationals will come to London or New York because other wealthy individuals from overseas are buying there, but they are not interested in getting to know the local community in those cities. They also tend to bring their own domestic staff with them,” explains Rohit Talwar, chief executive at Fast Future, a research company that analyses future trends.

Davidson agrees. “The super-rich will often lead their lives quite in isolation. They are not going to be greeting fellow parents at the school gate as they don’t do the school run as the kids will be dropped off by a chauffeur in a bullet-proof Range Rover.”

To emancipate ourselves, the working class too must come to realise that we also have no country and come together to engage in a orld-wide class struggle against the capitalist class.

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