Pick up a bargain holiday home in the sun - but beware the sting in the tail

Prices of dream properties on the Med have well and truly crashed. But new and rising taxes should give you pause for thought, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

If you are just back from your summer holidays, you may well be thinking about houses. You may be thinking about how nice it would be to own a little house in France, Greece, Turkey, Italy, or perhaps in Spain. You'd save a fortune on hotels, you'd be able to go to the same place every year, you could buy stuff in markets guilt-free, knowing that you had a local house to furnish, you could make money by renting it out when you weren't there, and, of course, having a holiday home would mean that, when discussing your holidays, you could refer to "our villa". It all just sounds like bliss.

Read the newspapers and you will think that, right now, it is also bliss on the cheap. If you wanted a beachfront home back in 2007, says the Sunday Times, you had to be a millionaire. No more. Some of the "most beautiful and popular stretches" of Mediterranean coastlines are in the areas that have been hardest hit by the economic crisis. That means "there is no need to compromise on location any more". You can have a lovely new-build flat by the sea five miles from Monaco for a mere £120,000. You can have a new two-bed townhouse just down from St Tropez for £474,000, and, if you go to Brittany, there's a detached house with panoramic sea views near the "pretty harbour town of Morlaix" for just £208,000.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.