Last month, the UK ended its non-domiciled tax regime. This change had been announced in 2024, but its effective date was April 2025. The way this program worked was that if you lived in the UK but were "domiciled" somewhere else, you could limit the amount of taxes that you had to pay in the UK.
Only income and gains earned in the UK and foreign income and gains brought into the UK were taxed. If foreign income stayed abroad, it was not taxed. There was still an annual charge for long-term residents of the UK, but at a high level, this is how the tax regime worked.
The advantage for a rich people is that they could decide to reside in the UK because, hey, London is pretty cool, but at the same time they could nominate a lower-tax country as their domicile. For non-rich people, this became a controversial program, and so it was swapped for tax regime based on residency.
The reason I mention this is because it seems to be having a direct impact on Milan's real estate market. Since 2017, Italy has had a flat tax regime that allows new residents to pay a fixed annual tax rate of €200,000, regardless of how much money they earn abroad.
This has proven to be attractive among rich people and, between 2017 to 2022, the program attracted 2,730 individuals according to the Financial Times. But then the UK made its change and so Italy decided to colloquially rebrand its program to "svuota Londra", which translates to "empty London" in Italian.
It became about taking direct advantage of what the UK had done. And it seems to be working even better. In 2024, approximately 2,200 high-net-worth individuals relocated from the UK to Italy, with Milan being the primary destination. This has created a notable uptick in the luxury property market — more transactions and higher prices.
Whether you agree with these policy decisions or not, they will have an impact on the fortunes of London and Milan going forward. In 2023 alone, it is estimated that individuals holding "non-dom" status in the UK paid almost £9 billion in taxes and contributed to the creation of some 44,000 jobs.
Part of this is now flowing south to Milan.
Note: None of this is tax advice.
Cover photo by ANASTASIIA BUCHINSKAIA on Unsplash
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Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
I like cycling and I like brain health, and so today I signed up to participate in the Bike for Brain Health event that is taking place here in Toronto on Sunday, June 1, 2025. It's for an important cause:
Funds raised for the Bike for Brain Health are used to provide crucial funding for breakthrough research into cognition, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and aging brain health; medical programs and services for older adults living in our community; and education that supports healthy aging and healthcare solutions for a growing aging population.
One hundred percent of all donations go directly to the Baycrest Foundation, some of which support the cost of the event. Proceeds are then invested in leading-edge cognitive neuroscience research, advancements in the mitigation of age-related illness and impairment and the care and treatment of patients living with dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain function related illnesses.
And it's always fun to ride on the Don Valley Parkway without any cars.
The last time I participated, many years ago, I did the 50 km route on a single-speed bike. I ended up getting a flat tire along the way and was completely exhausted by the end of it. When I got back to base camp I think I had 3 or 4 hamburgers before going home to nap for a few hours.
This year I signed up for the 75 km route. I'm not sure that I'm better conditioned, but I do now have a bike with gears and I do have really tight fitting clothes. Surely this will help. I also have two weeks to get out and train. Hit me up if you'd like to lap High Park and "Mount Olympus."
And if you'd like to support my cycle and donate to Baycrest, here's my personal page.