With one of the most iconic capital cities in the world, Buenos Aires, and with a great potential as a centre for South American tourism, Argentina has much to offer both travellers and overseas property buyers.
Buenos Aires, often called the Paris of South America, has a population of approximately 13 million people and is considered as the richest city in South America and the Southern Hemisphere. The city is set to receive a boost this year as a new daily non-stop flight from London, operated by British Airways, starts this month. The city offers the visitors a unique mixture of European elegance and the enterprise atmosphere of the great cities. The texture of the city combines parks and wide boulevards framed by Parisian, Italian and Classical architecture, alternating with the skyscrapers of modernity and the districts of historical character and present life.
Spectacularly beautiful and utterly untouched, Argentina offers a huge variety of landscapes; ski the powdery slopes of the Andes; tread Patagonia’s dusty plains; explore lush rainforests in Missiones; ride horseback amid scorched red mountains in Salta; play the gaucho in the Pampas; and find shady refreshment in the Lake District’s evergreen forests.
In the decade since the financial crisis of 2001, Argentina has worked hard to establish economic prosperity, boasting five straight years of 9% GDP growth through 2007 and impressive GDP of 8% for 2010.
The country’s booming economy, primarily based on agricultural and natural resource exports, manufacturing and telecommunications has attracted significant levels of foreign direct investment. Labelled by the Financial Times as ‘China’s New Investment Frontier’, Argentina has seen levels of Chinese investment go from US$13 million in 2004 to US$ 2.45 billion today.
Argentina’s booming economy is fuelling investment interest across the real estate spectrum from residential to commercial assets and hotels. With attractive returns on investments, property investors from around the world are snapping up real estate opportunities, in anticipation of future capital growth.
In addition the tourism sector is also rapidly expanding; more than five million foreigners are expected to have visited the country in 2010, 15.5% more than in 2009, generating revenue of US$470 billion. According to the country’s Minister of Tourism, Enrique Meyer, tourism in Argentina is projected to grow at a rate of 10% annually until 2020, compared with the world average of 4.1%.
The Argentine Minister outlined some of the benefits available for the international investors, amongst them, the ability to transfer net profits from investments or repatriate the investments at any time; international investors also have equal protection under Argentine Law and equal access to the banking and financial sectors.
This increase in tourism numbers is having a positive effect on Argentina’s housing market, and the South American hotspot of Argentina has been named a future high growth luxury residential market by the Knight Frank Global Property Wealth Survey, 2010.
