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Real Estate Without Borders
Top 10 Happiest Countries on Earth + Why Costa Rica is Improving so much
00:26:14
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Real Estate Without Borders podcast. I am joined here today by the one and only Cameron Hutchinson, who is a global money, money mover. Yeah, Cardi. Cardi B. Money. Money. Is that Cardi B. Money moves. It is. He makes money moves like Cardi B. I'll look it up. But today we'll be talking about the happiest countries in the world. The World Happiness Report was recently released and if you've been following the show for a while, you know, we've covered this a couple of times. It's a good report. It, it goes through what countries are the happiest and, and sort of why. And it also, they've been doing it for like 16 years. So there's a lot of good historical data. So you can see how a lot of countries have changed. And there's some notable sort of increases and decreases in happiness around the world that we've observed. The biggest ones that we're going to get into today, Costa Rica being the biggest improvement in happiness in the world and Canada and the UK being the biggest decreases, both falling from. Well, much of the Western English speaking Western world has fallen out of the top. So we're going to talk about all that today. Anyway, Cam, anything you want to, want to jump into before we get started here?
- [01:18]
B
Yeah, I mean this is, I'll be honest with you, it's not something I typically look at. So we were looking at this together over the last little bit and it's interesting, interesting to see in the Western world kind of fall off a cliff really, and you'll jump into it from a long term period. I don't know. We both live in Canada. I think we can kind of speak to the, the economic hardships that are probably bringing people down a fair amount. You know, unemployment's up here pretty heavily and youth unemployment is skyrocketing. So the younger generation, which can always be pretty vocal, I know if we still count towards that generation, you and I, probably not anymore as we get older, are looking at a pretty bleak mindset compared to probably when we were coming out of school, you know, 15. What are we at now? We don't need to date it. So that one really stood out to me. I get Costa Rica. I don't know if you've gone yourself, but it is a beautiful place to live. And we can jump into what you're seeing from Canadians trying to find some happiness down there themselves with real estate investment also.
- [02:18]
A
Yeah, I think. Yeah, well, you were mentioning too, like how do we tie this into real estate investing? On a global basis. And I think it is a really interesting conversation because, like, Costa Rica is a good example of a place where a lot of US capital has been going maybe as an alternative to Mexico. And I think it's really been developing. So it's kind of coming from like out of that second world or even third world into sort of that more middle class. Yeah, exactly. Definitely developing economy. And you pair that with exceptional weather and geographic beauty and it doesn't. It's not hard to understand why it's performing so well. And Costa Rica is an example where you are seeing capital moving to. In the next episode we're going to release is going to be talking quite a bit about what's happening with currencies and where capital is going around the world. But, you know, there's some other ones here that are at the top of the list that you might not really, you know, like, it wouldn't really come on your radar as somewhere that you'd be thinking about buying a property if you're an American. Right. So the top of the list we've got Finland, Iceland and Denmark. They're not, they're not places we've had anybody ever request for us to get a guest from. You know, it's not a place where you think about investing, putting capital as a, as a, you know, maybe a second home or a cottage or whatever it is. Costa Rica certainly would fall into that, that category. Obviously geography plays a bit of a role, but I think also Finland, Iceland, Denmark, they're pretty socialist countries, so I think that that tends to. And they're small, they're cheap to run, they all have like pretty solid industry and sovereign wealth funds. So I think that probably contributes a
- [03:55]
B
lot to it, a heavy amount of good infrastructure. You know, Finland, I think, and I don't know exactly how the index breaks down, but Finland's been the top of that for, for a long time.
- [04:07]
A
Yeah.
- [04:08]
B
So I got to get myself over there to see what all the, the happiness is about because, you know, if you think about it stereotypically, it's. It's far north, it's cold, but everyone seems to really love it. But no, you, I mean, we don't see a lot of flow of funds from our standpoint and moving in to purchase properties up there. So I, I got to imagine it's that it's a comfortable lifestyle, you know, high taxes, but that also leads to high utility from those, which creates just an era where, you know you're going to be taken care of and you don't have all of these concerns over healthcare and stuff along those lines.
- [04:45]
A
It's funny though, but because you compare that to a place like Canada where we've basically, I mean, you can see it on this chart here. For those of you who are watching, we've basically been in a steady decline since. So rank, rank was number six in number five in 2011 and we're now like number, number 25. Even lower than the US for the first time ever, it looks like. Yeah, Canada's for the first time ever lower happiness than the U.S. you know, we, we think about like this as sort of places where Americans might be moving capital that are happy or progressing or improving their quality of life. Like a Costa Rica that tends to lend itself well to investability right outside of the countries like, you know, sort of your Nordic countries where you're probably not going to invest some of, maybe more of these destination areas where people are looking for, you know, a place to be a snowbird or whatever. It just, just to me is kind of the one that, that is worth observing.
- [05:51]
B
Well, that brings up an interesting question as you've been looking at this further with other charts and stuff in the past, is have you ever kind of deep dove down? Because I got to think from a real estate investment standpoint, we're kind of attuned to it from a Canadian perspective as you get somewhere warm and that's where you look at places like Costa Rica and Mexico and the tried and true one of being Florida, which I was just down to visiting some people the other week. And I mean, if I'm not mistaken, you're down escaping a bit of the last bit of cold yourself. So I'd be curious to try and deep dive into it. Maybe you've got on the top of your head is where you're seeing a lot of the flow of fun from a state perspective into international real estate development or investment. Excuse me, because main purpose from my standpoint and from a lot of our clients standpoint is you buy a property down south, you, you invest in spaces down south, it's higher current higher tourism, so you can get some airbnb revenue. Obviously the climate's better than March. As I'm looking out into passing ice storm or rainstorm in northern onto Canada, not northern Canada. So it'd be interesting to see if we could pull the statistics on that side. You know, you're thinking about the happiness index and we'll keep tying back to Costa Rica, but looking at some statistics ahead of time, just, you know, it's still Not a large percentage of total volume of flow. The last statistics I could see was 2024, but you've still seen almost what so 0.013% in 2023, up to almost 1% of 1%, excuse me, of investment of Canadian flow of funds. And I think a lot of that has to do with Costa Rica. One is beautiful, the beaches are great, the lifestyle is great. They kind of call it the pura vida lifestyle down there. But also the country's done an excellent job of protecting what makes it so unique and beautiful. And that's probably a good purpose and a good reason why you've seen such an increase in the happiness index and you're seeing more and more international investors get interested in purchasing down there and you don't have from an investment standpoint and you're going back to kind of that currency flow. 99% of all the purchases are done in dollar. So it makes it an easier kind of apple to apple investment standpoint when you don't have to take currency fluctuations or risk into consideration. And on top of that, deal with your day to day living for when you have property down there or an investment down there of having to jump between too much multiple currencies, well, they can lead to upsides, they can lead to additional risks, can also lead to additional headaches just from a management and budgeting standpoint. So I have to imagine that's probably why we're seeing an increased flow there.
- [08:38]
A
Yeah, we had like in regards to what you were mentioning about where Americans are looking, we had the chief economist from nara, the national association of Realtors, the author of the report that I have up on the screen here, he was on the show and we talked to him a little bit about what are, what's happening with and where you and I, I think are, or I'm at least going to interview somebody down here in, in Palm Springs, California about whether or not Canadians are buying way less real estate here or net sellers of real estate here. And it seems to be, you know, a trend that we're hearing in Florida as well that appeared in the report. But you're also seeing this trend of an increasing percentage of respondents who reported a US client seeking a residential property abroad. So that's real US Realtors who have a client who might be looking for a property outside of the US and it's 16%. The only time it's been nearly as high was in 2023 and in 2016. And the big reason why they're doing that is for a vacation Home and then secondary to that, as you mentioned. So 25% for a vacation home, 24% as a residential rental, 22% as a primary residence, and then you get that sort of 20% both vacation and rental. So I think like the, like what you're mentioning is observable in the data that, you know, realtors in the US at least are reporting that they have clients looking most popular destinations on this list here. Mexico, although it's been declining in popularity, was like, you know, peaked at 16% in 2024, down to 8% in 2025. Nada appeared on the list again. Canada. Canada's actually been increasing, you know, from 3% 10 years ago to 6%.
- [10:20]
B
That's interesting. Yeah, it's got to be a lot of cottage country and you know, the, the up in the mountain. Yeah, those lines. Yeah.
- [10:28]
A
Yeah, I think, I think a lot of recreational property for skiing in the mountains, etc. Like I would, I just did a cat skiing trip at, at one of the nicer places in Fernie and the guy, all the guys there were from the US and they're like, this is, you know, some of the best skiing in the world, certainly the best skiing in the continent. Right. So, yeah. And then you've got Costa Rica on this list. It was 8% in 2024, dropped to 4%, but still like, you know, pretty strong as a place where US investors are putting their capital.
- [10:59]
B
And politically it's quite a nice place. Right. I mean, I know we're diving in on this, so we should do a real good deep dive and reach out some context on it of what you're seeing kind of boots on the ground there. But politically it's quite stable.
- [11:12]
A
Well, I think they have an agreement with the US like for military protection. Right?
- [11:16]
B
Oh, that's beyond me. I wouldn't really know, but I wouldn't be surprised given how far reaching it is. But you could be shifting around as of late if we're going back to that happiness index. What would be the other ones if you're kind of getting out of the top 10 because again, you see so many of the Scandinavian, northern European countries out there. And I think it's been addressed quite widely that a lot of it has to do with support systems and stuff along those lines. None of their economies are absolutely crushing it. The Costa Rica one, we'll be diving in on it because it's quite interesting. I think I saw Mexico up on there still as well.
- [11:52]
A
Yeah. So you've Got the top 10 is Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Costa Rica, Sweden, Norway. So basically the only one that would sort of be where Americans are putting capital in there is in that Costa Rica. And then you've got Netherlands, Israel, Luxembourg and Switzerland. New Zealand at number 11 and Mexico at number 12, which is really interesting as well.
- [12:17]
B
Yeah, I mean you had on this could have been ages ago when I was going through kind of a lot of the old episodes. But the gentleman from his name is Basil talking about Henley and Partners Henley and they're talking about what was it? New Zealand mainly as being a huge increase one because it is a happy place to live. So it kind of relates back to what you're talking about, but also seeing a lot of people go over there almost as a hedgehog, like a political risk hedge. You know, I can't even managing a property on that time zone from over here. From an investment standpoint, it's probably a bit of a headache and keeping track of people back home would be a bit of a headache as well. But yeah, you're seeing Mexico up there from a happiness index and I get, you know, if you go there, you could certainly understand why. And from North American investments. I mean, it's an easy place to manage. Right. So it's quite an interesting one. It's. I'm never gonna not be disappointed by seeing Canada fall so much.
- [13:21]
A
I know, yeah. It is crazy, right? Like number 25, like for the first time ever behind the US in in happiness and reported happiness. And you know, then you. There's some other countries here that are interesting, like from a global investment perspective. So you've got Mexico, you've got Australia, which, you know, I think we do see it's in the Anglosphere. So you do see like some interest in. In. From. From, you know, Commonwealth capital in that country. The other ones that kind of stood out to me, the UAE and, and Saudi Arabia, we're seeing obviously a ton of economic mobility. A lot of people were moving over there for work. I would imagine some of the conflict's probably going to. To change that result a little bit. This report came out before that sort of started, but could also not. Right. I mean you look at like Israel ranking so high and they've sort of had a lot of that stuff going on for several years now. Right.
- [14:17]
B
Yeah.
- [14:18]
A
So you know that.
- [14:20]
B
Do you know what this actually qualifies as happiness is? It's.
- [14:23]
A
Yeah, it's a pretty detailed breakdown actually. So there's a bunch of different things. They, they did a whole study on like social media. It says like social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to, to cause changes at the population level. So social media wasting time, product traps like there. So that, that's a big one. There's the faith in institutions. So like whether or not people feel like their governments are actually trying to help them, which I think is a big theme in Canada and the U.S. where you know, you have democracies and like you know, 50% or even higher in some cases because you get such low voter turnout, know 30% of the country elect someone. 70% of the country doesn't feel like they're represented by that individual. And so your faith in the institutions erodes quite a bit. So there's that then there's obviously just like general economic well being, things like that. Yeah, yeah.
- [15:23]
B
No, it's an interesting statistic report and I know they do it on a year by year basis. It's also interesting as you do, as you'd kind of alluded to before, see places that wouldn't be considered global superpowers from an economic standpoint. Yeah. The United States being above us, but they seem to be, if you go back to it, I think they're on a continued downward trend. And that would probably be the difference in what everybody's relating to as kind of the K shaped economy and you know, a portion of the states feeling left behind and the other portion of it just absolutely thriving. And those would be the individuals that are looking at other places as well to get some replacement pre to diversify their investment portfolio too. Are the people that are on the up and up.
- [16:07]
A
Yeah. I think the other interesting thing to observe is like if you look at those, the Nordic dominance, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, you know, they're not the cheapest places to live. Right. They rank highest. Which would suggest when you tie it back to the real estate thing that housing costs alone aren't. Aren't this, you know, super important happiness factor. People care about predictability, stability and social trust. They're okay to accept a bit of a quality of life versus income or tax trade off it would appear or at least that's the way that that materializes in, in people's reported happiness. You know, Costa Rica I think would be kind of the opposite where not a high income country. So happiness isn't purely income driven and it's sort of becoming one of those like lifestyle arbitrage markets for Americans. Right. Huge rise of expat and remote workers moving there. This creates a lot of real estate demand for and I think you're seeing a lot of this Europe has like that, that brand, right. I think people think sort of like south and Central America and maybe think a little bit of political instability or issues with safety, whereas like Europe doesn't. They don't think, they don't think that. Even though they're probably somewhat comparable now, especially with a lot of the political stuff that's going on in Europe. But this, I think is creating a lot of demand for your Central America because it's so close to the US Same time zones, easy to remote work over places like Southern Europe, right?
- [17:41]
B
Yeah. And the Nordic countries. You know, the people that are on the happiest index seem to be, or the investment flow for them is going down to a similar extent into warmer climates as well to avoid some of those quote, unquote winter blues. You know, they've got the, the investment corridor or the travel corridor down into Spain, East Italy, Croatia, et cetera. So they probably get that additional benefit also of, of being able to escape some of the gloominess. Although I think part of the reasons why they're probably so happy or so happy is because they find joy within their, their climates and enjoy the winter themselves.
- [18:17]
A
Yeah, 100%. The one other thing I wanted to add before we wrap up on this is like this sort of Western decline because I think that, that like, we think a lot about demand side and like where people would want to put money, but it's also, you know, the supply of capital. Maybe I'm getting it backwards, but you know, like, where are this, you know, where are these investors likely to come from? And you're seeing like the US in 23rd, Canada and 25th, the UK in 29th. These are the places where a lot of that money is coming from. Right. Where people aren't happy with the quality of life that they're getting in their own country. But, but you know, and if you're, if you're middle class in U.S. canada or the UK, you're feeling a lot of economic pressure, right? You're, you're thinking, I'm, inflation's killing me. My, you know, my wealth is being eroded. I'm getting taxed super heavily and I don't feel like I'm getting the quality of life as a result like people in Finland and you know, Scandinavia, what are my options? And their options all of a sudden become, well, can I go capture that lifestyle arbitrage of Costa Rica, of Mexico, where in a country like that I'd be In the top 10% of wealth, even if in my own country I'm in sort of in the middle and live a way higher quality of life in a different place or, or at least part part of the time throughout the year. And I think that that's really driving a lot of that trend. I think in, in the west as well, you're seeing a lot of these like housing crisis narratives, huge declining perceived quality of life in major urban areas and people are really looking to get out. Right. They're trying to figure out a way to improve their quality of life and they can't really do it domestically as well.
- [20:08]
B
This divide that you're seeing, are you talking about the supply of people investing internationally? I think it would be worthwhile kind of diving into a little bit more. But you're seeing down in the states right now 10% of the high earners, the 10% top earners are still accounting for 50%, about 50% of their overall consumer purchasing. If you're looking at it from an investment standpoint, that means you've got less of a bulk of people that can afford to travel. So use your two bedroom condo that you purchased in another market one for personal use to as you're saying that the lifestyle arbitrage but also you're going to have less people looking to get those Airbnbs because was that 90% of the population is having not being a large consumer so their travel is going down. And what have you on the flip side of it, if you're looking at it purely from a lifestyle arbitrage, you're trying to find that second or third home, that top 10% of earners, the they've got more capital than ever to push it out to actual do not utilize the properties that are being built from a vacation standpoint, but to actually purchase it as a, as a lifestyle choice or an investment standpoint because their wealth has been growing so exponentially large. That whole subsection or that whole wealth inequality gap that you're seeing is also definitely attributing to these happiness indexes. So they kind of correlate. You could see us continue to fall off in the States as a whole. But that's because there's a larger portion of the population that's unhappy with where they're at and there's a smaller portion of it that has so much wealth that they're ecstatic. 10% driving 50% of all consumer spending is a crazy, crazy, crazy that's outside the norm. And I'd be curious to see if it goes back to the last time you saw such a wide gap of going back to almost like was it The Roaring twenties or whatnot. And where that wealth of quality got up to where we're kind of sitting around today, if not a little bit higher back then. So it's probably worthwhile doing a deeper dive onto those types of things and who's buying where. But that would be a project in its own right for both of us to find those statistics.
- [22:15]
A
For sure. For sure. Yeah. No, I think it'd be a great follow up to this episode. Other, I guess the other factors you mentioned, like what, what do they measure here? So the core drivers that they talk about for happiness would be GDP per capita, which we know in Canada has been falling for like four years and in the US has been kind of exceptionally increasing. But that being said, like a lot of that is not accounted for or doesn't account for like the massive wealth disparity because you have these, that top 10% is, are massive GDP producers. And, and you know, your population isn't growing as massively in, in the US compared to Canada where our population is just like growing like crazy. Social support, life expectancy four, freedom, generosity and low corruption as well. I think if people feel like they're not kind of being ripped off by their governments, seems to matter. Only one of these is directly economic. Right. The rest of them are sort of perception. They're you know, social, institutional, environmental. But one the, the GDP one is, you know, I think probably a big one. If your economy is shrinking on a per person basis, people feel it like and they feel it first in housing. Right. That's the biggest piece of, of somebody's monthly income is how much money they spend on housing. In Canada and the U.S. it's like 30 to 50% of people's household income. If your GDP, your personal GDP or your income is, is improve, isn't improving, you're going to feel it the most in housing. And if you're housing, I don't. I feel like it's a really easy way for people to measure their quality of life. You know, oh, my house got smaller. Like it's like it was pretty. We feel it. Right. It's a very observable. You live with it constantly. So.
- [23:46]
B
Yeah. And you know, we related to before and I'm just trying to pull it up here so I can get proper statistics. Is mean versus median and GDP are on the income side. Right. And that's where you can really start to see how big the disparity is between the two. Trying to find some statistics on it. But mean does not show an average. Well, it's an average by nature, but doesn't show the disparity. So the top 10% having so much weight will drive up the average overall. And that's why median can be quite a nice statistic for it. 2023, the real median income was 78%. I should have pulled this up ahead of time. But the mean per capita 5%. So, you know, I probably should have actually dove into it came to mind while you were talking about it. But that's where you could start seeing those disparities come to fruition even more as you point to the percent.
- [24:44]
A
Let me think, is there anything else in this report here that I have to include? I think. I don't think so. Like the maybe the other one that was kind of stood out to me was the fact that youth happiness around the world is collapsing quite a bit. Under 25 is declining in especially rich countries. And this is really like your future buyer cohort for a lot of those places. You know, we're seeing delayed household formation, lower ownership rates and shifts towards renting and economic mobility. I think that that that's an interesting trend from my perspective. Other than that, I think we can wrap it up maybe and we'll say make sure you subscribe to the show because the next episode we're going is currencies and we're going to try and get some guests on as well from some of these countries to discuss with us and understand why things are the way they are and how that's impacting their economies. Anything you want to add before we wrap up here?
- [25:36]
B
No, I think there's no better way from looking at other areas from an investment standpoint and lifestyle standpoint than getting people that are actually living in it rather than us talking about it. So, yeah, we'll get some good guests covering off, as you'd mentioned, kind of down south in the States. We're going to look into some contacts for other regions that we were talking about, could be Costa Rica, Mexico or what have you, to give some better insight and actually provide their expert opinion on their local areas and what's going on there.
- [26:05]
A
Okay, we'll leave it there. Thanks a lot for listening. Make sure you hit the subscribe button to get to all the other stuff that we're talking about so you don't miss them. And we'll see you again as soon as we can.