The due diligence behind every Nest Invest Global listing — and every market we’ve stepped back from.
Most overseas property marketing tells you where to buy. We think the more useful thing to show you is how we decide — including the markets we’ve walked away from, and why.
Every market we look at gets run through the same lens: the gap between what a property can realistically earn per night once it’s built and managed properly, and what it costs to get in today. When that gap is wide and the fundamentals behind it are real — infrastructure, government backing, genuine tourism growth, credible developers, professional management — we list it. When the gap closes, because prices have run ahead of what the market can actually pay a guest to stay there, we stop. Not because the market failed. Because the price that made the numbers work is gone.
Below is that framework applied, honestly, to every market we currently promote, every market we’ve paused, and every market we’re still watching. You can read more about our full process on How We Invest, and about our approach on the About page.
What is Nest Invest Global’s due diligence process?
Every project we bring to clients goes through five stages before it reaches a listing. We score markets against a weighted matrix of indicators — infrastructure investment, government initiatives, tourism trajectory, capital flow, legal ownership frameworks, and more. We try to enter after a market has proven itself but before it’s saturated with institutional money. Every recommended project gets a personal site visit — we don’t list what we haven’t stood in. And every developer’s yield projection gets rebuilt from scratch using real comparable rental data, honest management costs, and conservative occupancy assumptions, stress-tested against a downside case. If a project doesn’t clear that stress test, it doesn’t get listed — regardless of how the headline numbers looked on the developer’s brochure.
The nightly-rate-to-entry-cost gap discussed throughout this piece is the plain-English version of that stress test. It’s the same question in a form you can check yourself: could this property realistically earn enough per night, at realistic occupancy, to justify what you’d pay to buy it today?
Why isn’t Nest Invest Global currently listing in Cyprus?
We sold in Cyprus, and those clients did well — genuinely well. That success is the reason we’re not listing there right now, and that’s worth explaining rather than glossing over.
Say a client bought an apartment from us years ago for £70,000. Today that unit might be worth £210,000. That’s a real result. But the achievable nightly rate for a well-run short-let in that same building hasn’t tripled alongside the resale value — it’s grown, but nowhere near proportionally. A buyer entering today at £210,000 is underwritten by roughly the same nightly income that used to justify a £70,000 entry price. The yield story that made the original deal work doesn’t apply to the current price.
This shows up in the wider market too. Cyprus is not in trouble — quite the opposite, transaction volumes hit a 17-year high in 2025 and prices across most districts are still rising. But mainstream residential gross yields in Cyprus currently sit in the region of 5% for apartments — a perfectly respectable return for a mature European property market, and nowhere near what our off-plan, emerging-market clients are underwritten for. Developer permit activity has also cooled noticeably, which tells its own story about where confidence sits among people building for a living. None of this means Cyprus is a bad place to own property. It means the entry price that made the yield case work for Nest clients isn’t currently available.
Why isn’t Nest Invest Global currently listing in Montenegro?
The same mechanism applies. Montenegro delivered strong past results for exactly the reason it’s currently paused: entry prices have moved well ahead of what achievable nightly rates can support, and that’s compounded by a short-let management sector that remains fragmented — a lot of individually-managed listings rather than the kind of professional, branded operation that protects both guest experience and an owner’s pricing power. Combined with pockets of local oversupply in the areas that were popular five years ago, the yield math no longer clears our bar at current prices.
We’re not ruling Montenegro out. If pricing corrects, or if a development comes to market with genuine professional management behind it, we’ll look again.
Why is Nest Invest Global promoting Batumi, Georgia right now?
Batumi is a market where the fundamentals and the pricing still align. Georgia’s tourism sector had a record 2025 — nearly 6.9 million international visits nationally, and hotel occupancy in Batumi itself climbing through the year, with the summer season regularly pushing 90%+ occupancy. That’s not a one-off; infrastructure spending in the country has topped $620 million recently, funding hotel construction and airport connectivity, and branded international developers have taken notice — Eagle Hills, the group behind Dubai’s Burj Khalifa district, has committed a multi-billion-dollar mixed-use project including a site near Batumi, and Wyndham is building a branded hotel and residence development in the same area. Entry pricing in Batumi still reflects an emerging market, not a mature European one — which is exactly the gap we look for.
Why is Nest Invest Global promoting Zanzibar right now?
Zanzibar’s arrivals passed 917,000 in 2025, up over 7% year-on-year, and the island is running near-90% bed occupancy in peak periods with average stays over eight nights — genuinely strong demand fundamentals, not a speculative bubble. What makes it more than a tourism story is who’s backing it: Hilton has entered the market with a branded beachfront resort, TUI has expanded its resort portfolio, and government-registered investment projects in tourism-related development now total well over a billion dollars. Airport and infrastructure investment is ongoing and government officials have been explicit that this is an early-stage window before the destination matures further. As with Batumi, entry pricing hasn’t yet caught up to that trajectory.
Why is Nest Invest Global promoting Lombok and Sumbawa in Indonesia right now?
Lombok and Sumbawa sit a step behind Bali in visibility, and that’s the opportunity. Indonesia has been actively de-risking foreign investment here — the government cut the minimum capital threshold for foreign-owned business entities by roughly three-quarters in late 2025, a deliberate move to bring in serious investors without an unnecessary barrier at entry. Physically, Lombok’s international airport is mid-expansion and a new commercial airport has opened at Sumbawa’s Kiantar, dramatically cutting the friction of reaching the island from Bali. Reference land pricing in parts of Lombok runs at a fraction of Bali’s, which is the raw version of the gap we look for: comparable natural assets and improving access, at pricing that hasn’t caught up yet. We treat this as an early-stage opportunity and size client exposure accordingly.
Why is Nest Invest Global promoting the Dominican Republic right now?
The Dominican Republic posted a record $5 billion in foreign direct investment in 2025 — its fourth consecutive annual record — with tourism and real estate together accounting for over 40% of that inflow. Visitor numbers exceeded 11.6 million in 2025, and the government’s CONFOTUR programme gives qualifying tourism-zone developments a 15-year exemption from income and property transfer tax, a meaningful structural tailwind for net yield. Over $1.5 billion has gone into airport and port upgrades in the past few years alone. This is a genuinely mature emerging market rather than a frontier one — which is part of why we’re comfortable recommending it across a wider range of client budgets, from holiday-home buyers to larger investors.
Is Sri Lanka a good property investment market?
The honest answer is: the market thesis is good, but we’re not listing there yet — and the reason is instructive. Sri Lanka had a record 2025, with international arrivals topping 2.36 million and the government targeting 3 million for 2026. That’s real, structural growth, not a one-off rebound.
But tourism revenue actually fell in 2025 compared to 2018, despite higher visitor numbers — because average daily spend has been dragged down by the rapid growth of informal, unbranded guesthouse accommodation, which industry estimates put at close to 40% of the market. That’s the fundamentals checklist working exactly as intended: strong demand, but weak management-structure quality, undermines achievable nightly rates and pricing power. This isn’t a market we’d reject. It’s a market where we’re waiting for the right finance-backed, professionally managed development to bring the fundamentals into alignment with the demand story.
What about Vietnam and other Watching-tier markets?
Vietnam, along with select markets in South and Central America and Africa that we’re tracking, sits in the same position as Sri Lanka: promising tourism and macroeconomic fundamentals, but the current bottleneck is finding developer partners with genuine finance backing and professional management structures — not the underlying market itself. As with every tier in this framework, that’s a moving assessment, not a permanent verdict.
What would move a Watching-tier market into Promoting?
Almost always, it’s the arrival of the right partner: a developer with a credible delivery track record and a proper management structure for short-let operation, at a project scale and location where our stress-tested numbers hold up. It’s rarely the macro story that’s missing in these markets — it’s finding the specific project that translates that story into a deal we’d put a client’s money behind.
What’s the difference between a “paused” market and one Nest Invest Global has rejected?
Everything. A paused market is one where the fundamentals are still real but the current pricing doesn’t clear our yield bar — Cyprus and Montenegro both fall here, and both are markets we’d happily return to if pricing or management quality shifts. We don’t currently list in a number of other markets simply because they’ve failed the fundamentals checklist outright — weak infrastructure commitment, no credible capital flow, no path to professional management. Those aren’t part of this content series, because there’s no interesting “why not yet” story to tell — just “not currently, and not obviously changing.” The tier distinctions in this piece exist specifically to separate genuine timing calls from genuine no’s.
This is a living assessment. Markets move between these tiers as pricing, infrastructure, and developer partnerships evolve — and each shift will get its own honest write-up here.
If you’re weighing a smaller entry point, our related piece on where to invest $50,000 in overseas property applies this same framework at a different budget level.
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