This article originally appeared in the October/November 2023 issue of Dream of Italy.
Brad Allan is living his dream of Italy, doing something unique among American expats in Italy. I don’t watch much Italy content on YouTube. My late mother would call it a “busman’s holiday,” meaning a bus driver doesn’t go on vacation on a bus. But, I happened upon Brad’s World (www.youtube.com/BradsWorld) months ago and immediately looked for his email to reach out to him. I, too, dream of buying a home and maybe even an investment property in Italy so I jumped at the chance to speak to a down-to-Earth expert.
Many people in this post-pandemic world have been looking to make a drastic change and live the life of their dreams. Brad is helping them do just that. This isn’t his first rodeo in real estate as the Austin, Texas native has been renovating large apartment buildings for many years back home in America, but he has successfully transferred his skills to the Italian market. He started out spending huge chunks of time in Italy but has now moved to Montepulciano with his wife Olivia (“Oly”), daughters Lizzie and Katie, and their two dogs, Charlie and Kona.
Brad and his team of contacts (Italian real estate agents, architects and builders) help Americans find their dream Italian home. He knows where to search, who to have on your team and what to look for. Lucky for us, Brad shared some of his observations and how to set expectations for making your money back on a purchase and thoroughly enjoying life in Italy.
I interviewed him via Zoom in Italy and it will soon be a podcast that you can find at www.dreamofitaly.com/podcast.
Kathy McCabe: I am so excited to have one of my favorites — a YouTube star, Brad Allen. I found him through his YouTube channel, Brad’s World. Welcome, Brad! How are you today?
Brad Allen: I’m excellent. Kind of a crazy day here in Italy. In Italy. There was a big storm and the rivers were flooding, and I was going to see a 700-year-old palace that the owners contacted me about showing on my channel, and it was unbelievable. They’ve owned it for 400 years. The same family. The Buonvisi family (www.PalazzoBuonvisi.com).
Kathy: Wow. Where is that?
Brad: It’s in Bagni di Lucca. It’s a hot springs town.
Kathy: How much was this palace?
Brad: 680,000 euros, 6,000 square feet, five bedrooms, three baths, two huge living rooms with Murano glass chandeliers, walk-in fireplaces (you don’t want to do that, but they’re big enough, you could almost stand in them), a swimming pool in a separate garden and a spa in the cellar. It was phenomenal.
Kathy: Lucca is adorable, the home of Puccini. We filmed there recently to talk about Puccini, but it’s in a fantastic city. A lot of American expats are looking at it. But let’s back up a little. Brad, tell me your story, where you’re from, what your career was and what landed you in Italy.
Brad: I have done a lot of remodeling of a lot of apartments in the U.S. Took not-so-great apartments and turned them into as special of apartments as I could. I also owned a furniture chain called Build a Sofa and did that for a quarter-century, but mainly it was the apartments. When I was finishing my last project, the whole time I was doing the project, I was saying to myself, “When I’m done with this, I’m done. And I’m going to Italy and I’m taking all that I do here to Italy with me and buying some really nice places.” And that’s what we’ve done. We live here full-time now in Southern Tuscany in Montepulciano, and we have four really pretty palace apartments that we renovated and rent out. It’s been wonderful. It’s better than you can even imagine.
Kathy: Like a dream of Italy.
Brad: Yeah, you can keep dreaming because no matter how good you dream it, it might even be better than that.
Kathy: What was the process of making this decision? Why do you say it’s not so hard?
Brad: We have traveled here for years and years, maybe not as many as you, but at least 15 years we’ve been coming consistently to Italy and elsewhere in the world. But we always came back to “Where would we want to live once we want to leave the U.S.?” and Italy was top of the list. I say it’s not so hard because I think we put a lot of stuff in our mind that this is going to be so hard and a big change. But I tell people, you do so many things in your life that really truly are hard. Getting a divorce or seeing a loved one die or putting yourself through school, working, all these things.
Moving to Italy is like a vacation compared to any of those things. I mean, yes, there are things that you have to do. You have to pull documents together. You need to make sure that regardless of which visa you want to get, whether it’s the elective residence visa or the remote working visa or the teaching visa, you need to make sure that you qualify. But it’s as simple as pulling your records, sending them in, and if you do qualify, they’re happy to have you here.
Kathy: And you can get this elective residence visa, even though you are basically creating a company or buying properties in Italy?
Brad: You can’t do it just by buying a property. However, if you buy properties to give you enough passive income to get you over the threshold, which is approximately 35,000 euros a year (if you’re a married couple, it’s 20% more, so around 40,000 for a couple)… that would be your passive income and you’re allowed to make that passive income here.
Kathy: Fascinating. Was this part of your plan that you were going to renovate these buildings to be part of that passive income qualification?
Brad: No.
Kathy: But just so people know, that might be an option. So they would have to buy them before they apply for this visa, correct?
Brad: Yeah. Or if you had rental income even in the U.S., any sort of passive income, dividends, interest income, your social security disability, I believe all those things would qualify as passive income.
Kathy: If anyone is interested, I know a great lawyer who lives in Italy and goes back and forth to America. He has a PhD in taxation, but he understands all the passive possibilities and even setting up your own trust that passively pays you.
So that’s how you’re living in Italy currently. But tell me, the last few years, what was the buildup to the full move? I’ve learned many things from your YouTube channel, but I think the hardest thing for a lot of people is knowing exactly where. You were looking for a place, not only to live, but also where it would be a good place for tourists that you could rent nightly. You chose Montepulciano— tell me why, personally and for this professional endeavor.
Brad: Professionally, I felt it had the right mix of price versus bookings. Let’s just talk about Rome. If you’re in the city center, you’ll be booked 365 days a year, more or less. A decent two bedroom, two bath is going to cost you $800,000, $900,000, $1 million, but you’ll get a great return on it.
In Montepulciano, the prices were a lot less, but we still book a lot and we get a very good price because there’s not an incredible number of nice rentals available. You get a good return on the nightly rent. You’re rented out maybe 300 days a year. We really just die off in January and February—after the day of Epiphany until the beginning of March, it gets pretty slow. Now, that being said, we already have bookings in the end of January and in February for next year.
Kathy: I know many people who bought in 2021 or 2022. One of the episodes in Season 3 of Dream of Italy is Americans who were buying in Abruzzo. For them it was Covid that pushed them to make a change in their life. But the big question is finding the real estate agent. How did you find yours? Can you give us a name and some tips?
Brad: In Montepulciano, I used my agent Marta Picinetti. I have a list. I have four agents that I work with in Tuscany down through Rome. The agents all speak English very well, which I think is important because it is just too complicated here to try to do it yourself in a foreign language. We have properties that have great value to them. They may not be cheap, but they have great value.
Kathy: What do you look for when you say great value? What stands out for you?
Brad: A lot of house for the money. I just did one that was 149,000 euros south of Rome, a town, hilltop town called Rieti.
Kathy: America’s gotten expensive, and that is one of the big draws to move to Italy and buy property in Italy. And I know that you probably ended up paying cash for your places because it’s hard to get a mortgage. Did you find it hard?
Brad: If you’re non-EU it’s very hard to get a mortgage here. The only way that I found was through one bank where if you moved a stock fund, bond type cash account into their bank, they would loan against your own money, like a Schwab or TD Ameritrade, whatever account where you can borrow against your funds. But that’s the only way, because they can’t check. They don’t know Brad Allen from the hole in the wall.
Kathy: An interesting thing we talked about last time we chatted is not a lot of real estate agents want to help you find a rental.
Brad: That’s correct. I think part of the problem is the price. I think if you went to a real estate agent here and said, look, I’ll pay you 2,500 euros, if you’ll help me find a rental, they would be into it. Because a good salary in Italy is around 1800 euros a month. So if you were to offer someone 5% to bird dog it for you, I think that’s a good option. You can find rentals from five, six, $700 a month. But if you’re not here, I think you need someone to help you close it down, to make the introduction. Find an agent and just offer ‘em a cash bonus if they can get you a rental. Maybe it’s only a thousand Euros…But if you’re renting something for a year and it’s 500 euros, that’s 6,000 a year. What’s another thousand?
Another good idea is to pick a slower month, January, February, March, November and you can go on Airbnb. I’ve seen stuff at a 75% discount on Airbnb when you’re renting for a whole month or 60 days. You won’t even have to have your visa. Take those 60 days to find your rental, walk around towns and find for rent signs, use Google Translate, if you don’t speak Italian and talk to people. Usually someone around speaks English. Make a good friend that does speak English here and have ‘em help you and buy ‘em a nice dinner when they help you
Kathy: I always say when we are talking about potential expats- go there for a few months, see if you like it. If you’re there in the winter, you’re there in what’s considered the worst time. Well, I think it’s the best time, but you’ll know what it’s like when there’s not a festa every night in the summer if you’re going to live there year-round. How are utilities prices? You have all these rentals—do they all have air conditioning?
Brad: I can say that the last month that I had a bill for was in August and for our biggest apartment, which has four AC units in it, and for another apartment that has two, so that’s six. We were pretty fully booked, I’d say at least at 75% those months. That month in August, the electric bill was 342 euros combined for the two apartments.
Kathy: Not bad. And for people buying who intend to rent it out, I think air conditioning is essential. Is it pretty easy to put in?
Brad: Usually it just involves punching a hole through the wall to run the cables and the power and getting it wired up. It’s not a difficult thing. Less than $2000 installed. And our palace apartments have walls that are 18 inches thick inside. And I’ve had people comment on my YouTube channel, well, you don’t need air conditioning. The walls are so thick, it cools down at night. It was getting up to 42, 43 degrees Celsius, that’s a hundred Fahrenheit.
Kathy: It’s been hot. With those 18-inch-thick walls, how’s your wifi??
Brad: We use what’s called a mesh system in the bigger apartment. So it’ll divide up the signal without degrading it. A lot of those cheap things you can buy on Amazon, they’re like 20 bucks and you plug one here and you plug one there. Those will cut the signal in half. But a mesh system keeps the full strength and that’s what we use and it works perfectly.
Kathy: And do you have a formula of when people are looking for a property to rent out how much they should be making back, how long it should take ‘em? Are there any magic numbers or ratios?
Brad: I think it should be something like a low-risk investment because while real estate here isn’t maybe as liquid as a penthouse apartment in Miami, it does hold its value if you buy in the right place. You can get a good return, like a six, seven, 8% return with a good rental after all expenses. And that means every eight years you should recoup the full purchase price of your apartment. I think six, seven, eight years to recoup your purchase price would be a good goal. This will be my dream job and I’m super happy that people really appreciate it.
Kathy: You’re bringing joy, you’re making dreams happen. And there is such a huge satisfaction in helping someone complete that.
Brad: I tell people, maybe you decide that it’s not right for you. It’s not something that can’t be undone, especially if you buy a rentable property. Now you have a good investment. You can come see it once in a while, but you don’t have to live here all the time.
Kathy: What are some big things you’ve learned? What has surprised you both about your new life and the YouTube channel?
Brad: What I am really surprised at is the incredible difference in the cost of living here versus the us. House prices here are much lower than what you and they are, they’re incredibly, incredibly lower here. Wait till you see medical care. I think our cost of living here will be much less than half of what it was in the U.S. because you don’t have property tax here. I mean, they have it, but it’s not like property tax in the U.S.
Kathy: But it’s interesting when you do the numbers and for me, I go back and forth a lot. It makes more sense to live there and come here. I could come here for a month.
Brad: I wish we had done it a year sooner because we spent $18,000 boarding our dogs last year in the U.S. Here, we paid €35 a day. They get their own cabin and their own big green fenced-in yard. There’s a walk and three play times a day for 35 euros a day. Incredible. So it’d been cheaper just to keep them here and go home for a bit and come back
Kathy: To see the rentals you have, can you share your website?
Brad: If you go to tuscanpalace.com, you can see photos of all the places we’ve done. You can book directly. If you mention Brad’s World, you get a 10% discount. A little something. And we’re also available on booking.com and Airbnb. We have recommendations for the town (Montepulciano). There are so many great restaurants. People are afraid sometimes of being in a touristy town. But I tell you one benefit to it is that you have 50 great restaurants, not just 50 restaurants, 50 great restaurants, wineries, wine shops, everything that you would need.
For more information, please contact Brad Allan at BradsWorld8@gmail.com or visit his website www.tuscanpalace.com to see available bookings. Enter discount code “BradsWorld” for 10% off the lowest price when booking!