ROYAL WESTMORELAND has not had it this good in more than 10 years.
About $60 million from new home purchases is pouring into the luxury residential golf resort in St James as overseas buyers regain their appetite for Barbados real estate.
Construction director Ian Putley revealed the numbers and building plans during an interview with BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY. Construction of townhouses and villas worth $30 million is ongoing and more homes worth another $30 million “are in the pipeline for the coming six to nine months”.
“I can honestly say this is the busiest period for me in my 11 years at Royal Westmoreland. This is the highest intensity of building that we have experienced in terms of investment in that time. Everything that we are building is for somebody who has purchased the property, so we are not building anything speculative,” he said.
“We currently have six townhouses being built and five stand alone villas. Coming in the next six months, we have a further four town houses and a further four stand alone properties, which means a continuation of what is my busiest year in the last 11 years. We have seen a substantial turnaround from the previous five years.”
Putley could not pinpoint what was responsible for the resurgence among the mainly British buyers, and some from Canada and the United States, but he believed there was a growing number of people “who genuinely believe that there is a renewed confidence in the product that is Barbados”.
“I believe that people maybe now see Barbados as a safer environment for investment, they have weathered five very hard years in Europe and in North America and I think these guys feel that time is right, the confidence level is right and they are ready to reinvest,” he said.
“I hope that we are leading the trend, rather than bucking the trend. I do believe that if confidence comes back into developments like Royal Westmoreland that will start to feed into the rest of the island, and then similarly, over time, it will feed into the rest of the region.”
