Running costs
What a house costs after it is finished
The purchase price is the smaller number. Here is the one nobody puts in the brochure.
A second house in the sun has a running cost of between two and four and a half per cent of its value every year, and almost none of it is optional. On a two million euro villa that is somewhere between forty and ninety thousand euro to own a house you are in for eight weeks.
The line items, honestly
The numbers below are for a 350 square metre villa with a pool and a garden in southern Europe, used personally, not let. They come from actual annual accounts rather than agents' estimates, which are consistently about forty per cent light.
The three costs that surprise people
Empty-house utilities
A closed house still runs a dehumidifier, a frost line, a pool pump, an alarm, a router and a fridge. Standing charges on water, power and gas continue regardless. Two to six thousand a year buys you nothing at all except the house not deteriorating, and it is invisible in every purchase calculation.
The maintenance reserve nobody makes
External render, pool lining, flat roof membrane, terrace waterproofing, shutters, gates, irrigation, pumps. Each has a life between eight and twenty-five years, and on a house of any size at least one of them is due every year. One to one and a half per cent of the build cost annually is the honest reserve. Skip it for six years and the seventh year arrives with a bill for all of it at once.
The cost of not being there
Everything is more expensive when you are absent. Trades charge for the visit as well as the work. Deliveries need somebody. A leak found on day one costs a plumber, and the same leak found in week six costs a floor. Budget for a person whose job is to open the house, or budget for the consequences of not having one.
Where the savings actually are
Not in the gardener, and not in the housekeeper, both of whom are protecting an asset. The real savings are structural and are made once.
- A pool cover. It halves evaporation, halves heating and roughly halves chemistry. It is the single highest-return object you can buy for a house with a pool.
- Irrigation on a controller with a rain sensor and a leak cut-off. It pays for itself the first time a line fails in August while nobody is there.
- Planting chosen for the climate rather than for the first photograph. A lawn in Andalucía is a permanent monthly invoice.
- One good survey before purchase. Two thousand euro that regularly finds fifty.
Where a typical annual budget actually goes
The letting question
Letting the house for eight to twelve weeks covers most of this, and changes what the house is. Rental-grade means contract furniture, duplicate everything, a lock-off owner's store, a management company at twenty to thirty per cent of gross, and the acceptance that some weeks somebody will break something you liked.
The arithmetic works. Whether it is worth it depends on a question that has nothing to do with money: whether you want to walk into your own house in June and find it exactly as you left it in September.
Use it now
Running Costs
What a house in the sun costs every year once it is finished.
