A pattern repeats across our International desk. A family owns a house in Chelsea, a villa on the Palm and a compound in Ikoyi. Each was bought well. Each is advised by a different agency, none of which knows the other two exist. And nobody, including the family, can say what the position is worth or how quickly any of it could be turned into cash.
The cost of that is rarely a bad purchase. It is timing. When a family needs liquidity they sell whichever asset their most responsive agent happens to be handling, not the one the market is paying most for. Over a decade that is a materially worse outcome than the same portfolio managed as one position.
The second cost is currency. A Lagos sale in naira, a Dubai purchase in dirham pegged to the dollar, and a London holding in sterling produce exposure nobody deliberately took. We have seen a currency move erase more value than a year of price growth added, on a transaction where the timing was elective.
The third is documentary. Each jurisdiction has its own idea of what proves ownership — an English registered title, a Dubai title deed, a Nigerian governor’s consent. A buyer’s solicitor in one country routinely cannot read the evidence from another, and the delay that causes is measured in months.
What works is unglamorous: one schedule of assets, one advisor who holds it, and a review each year that asks which holding is closest to its ceiling. Not a product — a habit. It is the single change that most improves outcomes for the families we act for, and it costs nothing but the discipline of writing it down.
