A Place in the Sun Live will return to the NEC Birmingham this September, bringing together thousands of prospective overseas buyers with agents, developers and currency specialists from popular international property hotspots. On the surface, this reads as a lifestyle event — a chance for retirees and second-home hunters to browse villas in Spain or apartments in Portugal. Look closer, however, and the show's continued resilience tells a more revealing story about the state of UK property capital and where it is choosing to flow.
The timing is significant. UK residential transactions have remained subdued through much of 2024 and into 2025, with Rightmove and HMRC data both pointing to a market still working through the aftershocks of higher mortgage rates, stamp duty threshold changes, and tighter affordability testing. Average five-year fixed mortgage rates, while down from their 2023 peaks of around 6%, still sit closer to 4.5–5% than the sub-2% deals borrowers enjoyed before 2022. For cash-rich investors and equity-heavy homeowners in the South East — particularly Surrey, where average property values exceed £550,000 — the calculus of buying overseas at a discount has become increasingly attractive relative to reinvesting in an expensive and illiquid domestic market.
Events like A Place in the Sun Live are a useful, if unofficial, barometer of this outbound appetite. The show typically attracts 12,000–15,000 visitors across its two-day run, and exhibitor numbers have grown steadily since pandemic-era travel restrictions eased. Spain remains the perennial favourite, accounting for roughly a third of enquiries at comparable events in recent years, followed by Portugal, France, Cyprus and increasingly Turkey and Dubai, where rental yields of 6–8% comfortably outstrip the 4–5% typical of UK buy-to-let stock. For landlords facing squeezed margins under Section 24 mortgage interest relief restrictions and looming EPC upgrade costs, the pitch of a furnished Spanish apartment yielding 7% net, with none of the UK's regulatory burden, is difficult to ignore.
This matters for the UK market in several ways. First, it represents a real, if modest, leakage of investment capital that might otherwise have supported domestic transaction volumes, particularly in the second-home and buy-to-let segments that already contracted sharply after the 2016 and 2021 stamp duty surcharges. Second, it underscores a widening gap between what UK property offers investors — capital appreciation averaging 3–4% annually in cities like Manchester and Leeds, against 6%-plus yields in emerging overseas markets — and what buyers are now prepared to accept. Manchester and Birmingham remain strong domestic performers, with rental growth still running above 5% year-on-year according to Zoopra's latest rental index, but even these hotspots cannot always match the yield arbitrage available in southern Europe once currency movements and lower entry prices are factored in.
The regional dimension is worth dwelling on. Attendees at NEC Birmingham events have historically skewed toward Midlands and northern buyers — Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle residents for whom continental property has become more accessible via low-cost flights from regional airports. This differs from the London-centric profile of similar shows held in the capital, where buyers tend to be higher-net-worth individuals seeking lifestyle assets rather than yield. The Birmingham show's persistence, and its scheduling in the traditionally strong autumn buying season, suggests organisers are betting on continued demand from this middle-market investor base — professionals and retirees with £150,000–£300,000 to deploy, precisely the bracket increasingly priced out of prime UK buy-to-let in cities like London and the South East.
Looking ahead six to twelve months, expect this outbound trend to persist rather than reverse, even as UK mortgage rates ease modestly through 2025. The structural drivers — higher UK entry costs, tighter landlord regulation, and comparatively better yields in southern Europe and the Gulf — are not cyclical quirks but durable features of the current cycle. Domestic developers and estate agents should treat rising interest in events like A Place in the Sun Live as a competitive signal rather than a curiosity: capital that could fund UK new-build purchases or regional buy-to-let portfolios is instead financing Spanish coastal apartments and Dubai off-plan units. For UK-focused investors, the lesson is to sharpen the value proposition — through build-to-rent schemes, higher-yield regional cities, or flexible financing — or risk losing an increasingly mobile investor base to overseas alternatives with fewer regulatory constraints and stronger headline returns.
