Lebanon's Largest Absentee Landlord

Lebanon's Largest Absentee Landlord

Everyone reads the possible return of a nonstop Beirut–New York flight the same way: new buyers from the Americas.

I read it differently. The Americas are less a pool of future buyers than a pool of absent owners.

The facts first.

In July, Washington moved to end a 41-year prohibition on direct flights to Lebanon. A U.S. security review of Beirut airport is still pending, and the State Department still advises Americans not to travel. MEA begins receiving a new generation of aircraft from November.

Nothing is scheduled yet. But a door has been unlocked.

Now the part aviation analysts miss.

Lebanese emigration to Brazil, the United States and Canada began well over a century ago. Those who left often kept their land. Their children inherited it. Then their grandchildren. With every generation, the tie to the property weakened.

In 26 years of brokerage, I have lost count of the plots and village houses that cannot easily be sold, developed or even properly managed because ownership is divided among relatives scattered across the world.

A cousin in São Paulo.
Another in Detroit.
Someone in Montreal whom the family has not spoken to in years.

One missing heir can turn a straightforward transaction into years of legal and administrative work. Multiply that by four generations.

A direct flight will not suddenly make a third-generation Lebanese-Brazilian buy an apartment in Beirut. But connectivity makes it more likely that members of the diaspora come back.

And an heir who comes once discovers what the family owns, meets the relatives and finally decides: sell, divide, renovate or build.

Each decision brings back into economic life a property that would otherwise remain dormant for another generation.

So the first real-estate effect of renewed connectivity with the Americas may not be demand. It may be supply: land and houses returning to the market after decades of fragmentation and inactivity.

But that requires an industry ready for a very different kind of client. Tracing heirs, clearing title, managing succession across three continents, representing an owner who will never live here, and managing the property once the legal work is done.

Few real-estate firms are equipped for that work.

Those that are will discover that the diaspora's real-estate story does not begin with a purchase. It begins with an inheritance.

Local Intelligence. Global Standards.

Jade Zoghaib
Founder & CEO, JSK Real Estate