The rich have found a place to escape the horrors of the world
WHEN Hong Kong-based financier Michael Nock wanted a place to escape in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, he looked beyond the traditional havens of the rich to a land at the edge of the world, where cows outnumber people two-to-one.
Mr. Nock, the founder of hedge fund firm Doric Capital Corp., bought a retreat 5,800 miles away in New Zealand’s picturesque Queenstown. In the seven years since, terror threats in Europe and political uncertainty from Britain to the US have helped make the South Pacific nation — a day by air away from New York or London — a popular bolt-hole for the mega wealthy.
Isolation has long been considered New Zealand’s Achilles heel. That remoteness is turning into an advantage, however, with hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson to Russian steel titan Alexander Abramov and Hollywood director James Cameron establishing multi-million dollar hideaways in the New Zealand countryside.
“The thing that was always working against New Zealand — the tyranny of distance — is the very thing that becomes its strength as the world becomes more uncertain,” Mr. Nock, 60, said by phone from Los Angeles during a recent business trip.
THE OTHER ‘GIVERNY’
Mr. Nock’s 2-hectare (5-acre) estate is named “Giverny” after artist Claude Monet’s iconic home and garden in northern France, and the “funny old farmhouse” is surrounded by ponds and mature plants, he said. Mr. Nock is converting a barn into an art studio on the property, which overlooks Queenstown’s Shotover River — a fast-flowing, turquoise stretch of water that tourists speed down on jet boats and whitewater rafts.
Twice the size of England, but with less than a tenth of its people, New Zealand ranks high on international surveys of desirable places to live, placing among the top 10 for democracy, lack of corruption, peace and satisfaction. With its NZ$250-billion ($180 billion) economy dominated by farming and tourism, the nation last week overtook Singapore as the best country in the world to do business and was rated second to the Southeast Asian nation as the top place to live for expatriates in a survey by HSBC Holdings Plc. in September.
House prices in New Zealand increased 12.7% in the year through October, and the average price in largest city Auckland has almost doubled since 2007 to more than NZ$1 million.
CHINESE RETIREES
Jack Ma, founder of e-retailing behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and China’s richest man, told Prime Minister John Key in April that he’d like to buy a home in his country, according to the New Zealand Herald. At least 20 of Mr. Ma’s 40-something colleagues have retired there, the newspaper said.
Mr. Key, a former currency trader, once described New Zealand as “England without the attitude.” It’s changed leaders just twice in almost 17 years and the last hint of terrorism came a generation ago, when French spies bombed a Greenpeace campaigning ship docked in Auckland harbor in 1985.
It’s that kind of stability that’s attracting a wave of “Brexit-inspired” migration to the island nation that gained prominence as the otherworldly backdrop to the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films.
New Zealand received 998 registrations from UK nationals interested in moving to the country the day after the referendum on European Union membership, versus 109 the day before the vote, according to data from the immigration department. That grew to 10,647 registrations in the 49 days after June 23, more than double the same period a year earlier.
ESCAPING HELL
“If the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket, they’re in the best place they could possibly be,” said David Cooper, director of client services at Malcolm Pacific Immigration in Auckland, the country’s biggest migration agency. “People want to get the hell out of where they are and they feel that New Zealand is safe.”
Mr. Cooper has seen an uptick in inquiries from US citizens over the past few months, he said, with the increasingly raucous presidential fight between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as well as the recent spate of mass shootings, cited as reasons to flee.