Let’s go to the dark side of the luxury real estate sector

Millions injected all discretions, invisible buyers, villas in several tens of millions of euros … behind the luxurious facades of properties at the top hide a perfectly oiled system. Great fortunes and criminal networks have found an ideal playground: luxury properties, protected by opaque and late assemblies. While some buy to whiten their money, others see prices explode, making access to property more and more difficult.

Luxury real estate, refuge for great fortunes and criminals

In the largest metropolises in the world, from London to Dubai via Paris and Miami, the real estate sector at the top has become much more than a simple luxury market. It represents a door of entry to the legitimacy of fortunes whose origin is sometimes doubtful. Where banks have strengthened their controls, the real estate sector remains a gray area, in which notaries and real estate agents are not subject to the same supervisory obligations.

One of the most used methods is based on offshore screens and account. Instead of buying a property directly in their name, investors create intermediate structures, often domiciled in tax havens. This mechanism not only hides the identity of the real owners, but also to optimize their taxation. In France, the real estate civil companies (skiing) are at the center of the problem. Although they are legal tools appreciated for real estate investments, their lack of transparency makes it an ideal tool for anonymous transactions for several million euros.

Ski and fiscal paradise: montages cut for opacity

The 2023 International France transparency report is definitive: most of the ski escapes the obligation to declare their effective beneficiaries. In the Paris region, less than a third of the graphs held through these structures has an identifiable owner. This phenomenon is not isolated. In London, in 2018, 170 billion euros in goods were held by foreign companies, including 90 % recorded in tax havens. The goal is always the same: to make the traceability of the funds almost impossible.

Transactions are all the more difficult to control since the sale of ski shares feeds advertising on Earth. Unlike a classic real estate purchase, this method allows you to transfer the property of a property without going through a notary, and therefore without leaving a clear trace in the public registers. Ideal land for scammers who try to make the origin of their funds disappear. In the meantime, the market continues to fly away, also influencing in the real estate sector for rent in the main cities where speculation becomes uncontrollable.

Price explosion, a direct consequence of money recycling

The massive influx of capital in the luxury real estate sector is not happy to enrich some well -informed players. It also helps to increase prices, making some districts completely inaccessible to conventional buyers. In Munich, New York or Singapore, it has become almost impossible to find a good within several million euros, even for a high income. In France, the French Riviera, Courchevel or some areas of Paris suffer the same phenomenon.

The effects of this extreme financialization are well known. Less goods on the market, increase in pressure throughout the sector and increasingly disconnected prices of local economic reality. Behind these transactions they hide invisible structures, often controlled by intermediaries specialized in these Assiemi. Some act in real merchants of goods, orchestral acquisitions and residents in waterfall to climb the tracks even more.

This system continues because there are faults and controls remain largely insufficient. Until skiing can be used to mask the identity of buyers and tax havens will continue to offer shelters for these assemblies, luxury properties will remain a privileged land for money laundering. Because in a world where money circulates without borders, transparency is not always the priority of those who take advantage of it.