The phone calls have changed.
Two years ago, an American calling me about London wanted to know one thing: is it cheap right now? The dollar was strong, prime London was soft, and the arithmetic did the selling. Buy in sterling, wait, sell in sterling. A trade.
The calls I get now start somewhere else. They start with the kids. With the passport. With a sentence that usually goes something like, “We just want to have somewhere.” Nobody says the word insurance, but that is what they mean.
I traded mortgage-backed securities before I ever sold a house, so I understand a currency play when I see one. This is not that. The strong dollar opened the door. Something else is walking people through it.
The currency case is real. It is also the least interesting part.
Let’s get the numbers out of the way, because they matter. A strong dollar against a sterling that has had a rough few years, layered on top of prime central London pricing that is still below its 2014 peak in real terms, means an American buyer is looking at a discount most of them have never seen in their adult lives. Add the softer regional markets — the Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Yorkshire — and a family that would be priced out of a second home in Nantucket or Aspen can own a proper house with land in England for the same money.
That is the headline. It is also the part any decent adviser can put on a spreadsheet, and it is not why people are actually signing.
What the buyers are actually saying
Here is the pattern I see, over and over, from the East Coast and the West Coast alike.
The family is not buying a holiday house. They are buying a base. They ask about schools before they ask about square footage. They ask how long they can stay on a visitor visa, and what it takes to stay longer. They ask which solicitor, which cross-border tax adviser, which bank will open an account for them. Those are not the questions of someone planning three weeks in August.
They are the questions of someone who has decided, quietly, that having all their life in one country is a concentration risk.
I would put it this way: a decade ago, geographic diversification was something a family office did with a portfolio. Now it is something a family does with its address.
The politics, plainly
I am not going to pretend the headline of this piece is an accident.
American political division has become part of the motive, and it would be dishonest to leave it out. I hear it from clients on both sides. The ones who lean one way tell me they are exhausted and want an exit ramp if things go badly. The ones who lean the other way say the same thing about a different set of outcomes. What they share is a loss of confidence that the next ten years at home will look like the last thirty.
That is the refugee I mean. Not someone fleeing hardship. Someone hedging against uncertainty, with the means to do it properly. They are not leaving America. They are making sure they have a second place to stand.
You can call that overcautious. I call it what wealthy families have always done when the ground feels less solid: they buy land somewhere else.
Where the money is going
London is back on the list, and I say that as someone paid to know. Prime central London — Mayfair, Belgravia, Kensington, Chelsea — is seeing renewed American interest after years of being priced for the Gulf and the Far East. An American buyer today is often the most credible buyer in the room.
But the country is where the strategy shows most clearly. The Cotswolds have become the default answer for the California buyer who wants something that looks like the England in their head. Herefordshire and Yorkshire are drawing the buyer who has already done the Cotswolds and wants more land for less money. These are families who intend to spend real time there, not visit.
Across the Channel the same thing is happening. Italy, Spain and Portugal — Lisbon and the Algarve especially — have become primary targets for American families building a European foothold. Ireland is the one that surprises people: Americans are now among the largest groups of overseas purchasers in both Dublin and the Irish country house market, many of them arriving from California and New York. Some of that is heritage. Most of it is the same logic as everywhere else — English-speaking, EU passport potential, a functioning legal system, and a country that feels welcoming.
What this means if you are thinking about it
Three things, from someone who now does this for a living on both sides of the Atlantic.
First, buy for the base, not the bounce. If the exchange rate is the only reason you are buying, you will be a nervous owner. Buy the house you would want to be in for a long stretch if you needed to be, and let the currency be the bonus.
Second, the structure matters more than the property. Who owns it, how you hold it, how you fund it, and what it does to your tax position on both sides — get that right before you fall in love with a drawing room. Your solicitor, your cross-border tax adviser, your lender and your immigration counsel are not an afterthought. They are the deal.
Third, decide what you are actually doing. A holiday house and a second base are different purchases with different answers. I have watched families buy the first and wish, two years later, they had bought the second.
The bigger picture
For most of my career, the traffic ran one way. Foreign money came to America because America was the safe place to keep it. That is still largely true. But for the first time, a meaningful number of American families have decided that “safe” means “not all in one place.”
The strong dollar made it affordable. The politics made it urgent. The result is a buyer who is not chasing a trade, but building an option — a family that wants to know that whatever happens at home, there is a door somewhere else with their key in it.
That is the Trump refugee. Most of them would never use the phrase. All of them know exactly what it means.
Jim Bell is Executive Vice President at Sotheby’s International Realty in Washington, DC, and a consultant to Sotheby’s International Realty UK, advising American buyers and sellers in the London and UK markets.