This looks more like Jurassic Park than paradise,” mutters Jean Pierre Dalais. The sun has disappeared behind clouds as black as the volcanic rocks that he is scrambling over. Raindrops, which sound and feel like water bullets, bounce off his arms as he bashes marker posts into the soupy earth.
Dalais is used to working through the occasional tropical flash flood: he is one of the Franco-Mauritian sugar barons who have carpeted Mauritius with cane. When the clouds lift, he brushes the damp hair off his face and points out the glistening sand bars that streak the Indian Ocean. “Can you imagine waking up and seeing that every morning?” he asks.
It’s a question well-heeled visitors to Mauritius’ five-star hotels used to ask, before bemoaning the fact that, unlike other upmarket island playgrounds — Barbados, Mustique, Mallorca — foreigners could not buy property without paying more than £300,000 to the government-run Permanent Resident Investment Fund and living on the island half the year.
But the question is not an academic one any more. A new law allows foreigners to buy freehold property — provided they don’t mind being vetted by the island’s prime minister to make sure they are posh enough. The island’s plantation owners are moving out of cane into condos and well-heeled — and well-spoken — Brits are top of their shopping list.
As he drives from his colonial-style home to the modern £1m beach house where he spends weekends, Dalais, who is behind the largest and swankiest new residential development, the £200m Anahita resort, says: “Britons make up half our tourist industry and account for about half of the second-homes market on Caribbean islands of a similar size. The potential UK market here is huge.”
Dalais, 41, is a poster boy for the emerging Mauritian property market. His Ciel Investment is building 250 homes on his family’s beachfront plantation at Beau Champ on the island’s east coast.
The new villas will range from £600,000 to £2m and will be available from the end of 2007. They will be built using traditional Mauritian timbers and local basalt rock. Buyers will be able to choose their own modern African-style interiors. Each villa will have its own private staff.
Anahita residents will have preferential access to the 18-hole golf course, designed by former Open champion Ernie Els. Yachts moored in the private marina will take divers to the coral reefs and deep-sea fishermen to the big blue. For golf widows, there will be a five-star Four Seasons hotel and spa that will act as an informal private club for residents.
Anahita is not the only holiday- home show in town. A rival scheme, backed by another local sugar family, is already under way on the west coast. Homes at Tamarina Golf Estate and Beach Club start at £400,000 for a three-bedroom villa and rise to £800,000 for a five-bed home. Each villa will be set on an acre of land with a private pool and hot tub.
Overall, about 10 luxury residential developments will be built on Mauritius over the next few years.
With sugar prices in freefall, plantation owners have lobbied the Mauritian government to change the law and open up the local housing market to overseas investors. Officials dithered as they struggled to solve a little local difficulty: how to keep Mauritius’s reputation as a decidedly upmarket destination.
In his office in downtown Port Louis, the Mauritian capital, Gerard Sanspeur, managing director of the Mauritius Board of Investment, says: “Mauritius goes for quality over quantity. We have always targeted people of a certain standard, and we will do the same in real estate.”
The problem for the government has been working out how to attract the property-buying aristocracy, while keeping out the chavistocracy. Ministers have come up with a set of strict financial rules that they hope will achieve the necessary social engineering.
Minimum investment in land alone is £300,000, and overseas buyers are expected to demonstrate that they have liquid assets exceeding £1m. Most new homes will sell for about £800,000. Only 1,500 new homes for foreigners will be built over the next 10-15 years, guaranteeing prices stay artificially high.
Most controversial of all, the prime minister’s office will vet prospective buyers. Hasn’t the national leader got better things to do than chase Burberry-clad hordes off the beach? “Vet is a controversial term,” Sanspeur admits. “Potential buyers must be looked at closely. We want to make sure that all the money that comes in is the right kind of money.”
To make sure even the wealthiest footballers’ wives do not sneak past the prole police, the government has devised a payments scheme that requires a PhD from Harvard to understand. Chardonnay and Tanya need not apply.
On reservation, 5% of the house price is deposited with the developer’s lawyers; two-and-a-half months later, when the deed of sale is signed, 30% of the cost is paid; 25% of the value is due on completion of the walls and roof. When the property is completed, 35% is paid, and the final 5% is handed over when the buyer takes possession, usually a month or so after the completion.
So far, so sneaky. But, even if you do have the right kind of cash and a Harvard brain, why should you invest in a tropical island that is nearly halfway around the globe when
the Caribbean is a relative stone’s throw away? Because, says Aliza Reger, Mauritius is different.
Reger, who is the daughter of lingerie entrepreneur Janet Reger, has lived in Mauritius on and off for the past 10 years. Reger underwear is manufactured in the island’s many textile factories. “I like the Caribbean, but, for my tastes, it has become too overdeveloped and American,” she says.
“Mauritius is more exotic. There is a unique, easy-going mix of African, Indian, British and French culture here that makes the atmosphere, not to mention the food, 10 times better than in the West Indies.”
Reger has a point. The slow, careful growth of tourism has left the island authentically Mauritian. There are no big resorts, and the new residential developments will be small-scale, low-rise and traditional.
The upmarket developers’ message is simple, if a little unconventional: come and have a go — if you think you are posh enough.
Anahita, 0800 083 5700, www.anahitamauritius.com ; Pam Golding Properties’ international division is marketing Tamarina. Contact Fabrice Orengo de Lamaziere on 00 27 217 622 617, or visit www.pamgolding.co.za
