Prestige Group, the Irish overseas property and investment company today released its first International Hotspots Index.  The Index analyses the current top-ten overseas residential hotspots, providing an incisive guide for investors who are thinking of buying foreign property.

[1] Offshore financing

It features all the factors that need to be considered before investing abroad, including: prices, rental yields, the local legal system, social and economic stability and the cost of finance.  Prestige Group undertakes this analysis to guide its business and has decided to make it publicly available for the first time.

The massive Airbus A380, in full Emirates livery that included the distinctive belly logo, graced the skies last Novemver, flying low along Dubai’s beachfront. Piloted by Capt. Claude Lelaie of Airbus, the aircraft glided several times along the beach at 1500 feet, thrilling the city’s residents and visitors alike, many capturing the sight on their mobiles and cameras, and commenting on how quiet the aircraft was, despite its double-decker super-jumbo size. The arrival of the aircraft in Dubai was made possible by Emirates, the world’s largest customer for the aircraft, and Airbus. This was the first time the A380 sported any airline’s full livery. Internationally renowned  Richard Hywel Evans architect, writing in today's Financial Times, said: As an architect whose work tends to be at the bolder end of innovative construction, I was expecting to spend a few days marvelling in the exciting architectural advances taking place in this Las Vegas of the east. After all, 100,000 Brits live here and a growing number are making it a holiday destination. Maybe I am missing something, but it is so awkward and fragmented. Iconic skyscrapers look lonely and adrift as they sit in unsplendid sandy isolation; the city’s buildings are far too removed from the essential infrastructure that makes any city work. Its relentless colonisation of the desert has led to “LA syndrome” – there is so much urban sprawl the city lacks a metropolitan heart. Moving around, you get a feeling of soullessness: one minute you are next to a towering skyscraper feeling enclosed among the opulence of a top-end hotel; the next you are moving through patches of barren desert past trudging columns of foreign workers. There is only one dual carriageway, no true coast road, and taxi drivers – always a great indicator of societal dynamism – seem rare. There is a palpable fast-buck mentality that only grows as more concrete, investors and poorly paid, exploited Asian workers enter the city every day. Since Sheikh Mohammed decreed that foreigners could buy freehold property in nominated areas in 2002, the property market has boomed. Large areas are half built; you feel as though the entire city should have a warning sticker attached to it – “work in progress”. There is a real chance of a property crash with all the speculation going on and British investors already face losing millions in a failed investment scheme, the first big property scandal to hit the country.