Good morning. Andrew here. This Saturday, we’re taking a look at an unusual opportunity that some of the ultrawealthy are taking advantage of: buying entire villages in Europe. Yes, you read that correctly. DealBook contributor Brent Crane explains how these bulk real estate plays work. Also, Sarah Kessler has an important Q&A regarding how companies are communicating about the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. She speaks with Steve Lipin of Gladstone Place Partners, a longtime public relations strategist to C.E.O.s. (He is a former journalist at The Wall Street Journal who practically invented the modern mergers and acquisitions beat — we competed against each other a quarter-century ago.) Finally, don’t forget to test your knowledge with our weekly quiz. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
European villages for sale
Some years ago, after selling their bed-and-breakfast in San Diego County, Jason Lee Beckwith and his wife began looking for hospitality property elsewhere. Their search moved progressively outward: Palomar Mountain, Joshua Tree, Portugal, Spain. In Grenada, Beckwith became briefly interested in some dwellings built into a cave on the side of a cliff, “but it just didn’t stick.” Then one day, he stumbled upon an article about an abandoned village in Spain that was up for sale — complete with a church, school, bar and even a swimming pool. He describes this as the moment his life split into “before I knew it and after I knew it.” In 2024, Beckwith made his first down payment on that property. Throughout Europe, there are thousands of quaint, attractive villages that are functionally deserted, depopulated over decades by residents in search of employment elsewhere. In Spain, Portugal and Italy, the problem of rural “desertification” has grown so dire it has become a political issue. In those countries, one can easily find an entire village for sale, some for well under $1 million.
Some of the villages are sold outright by a single entity or family owner. Others under fragmented ownership must be acquired property by property, which can require tracking down distant heirs. Wealthy buyers and tourism entrepreneurs have transformed them into isolated getaways — and at least a handful have become popular destinations for corporate retreats. Beckwith’s village, Salto de Castro, sits along a river near the Portuguese border and will cost him 310,000 euros (about $367,000) to acquire. Built in 1946 by an energy company for its workers and long abandoned, it is now a “city in ruins, just rubble and walls,” he says. The Californian estimates that the renovation will cost €7 million. “It’s been a roller coaster, honestly,” he says. “Good or bad, I’ve been enjoying the ride.” Elvira Fafian, whose website Aldeas Abandonadas (“Abandoned Villages”) specializes in unusual Spanish real estate sales, has seen a steady increase in foreign buyers seeking out “hamlets, villages, and rural complexes,” she says, noting that 70 percent of sales are intended for “business and tourism use.” Timur Negru, whose company AffordiHome connects foreign buyers with European properties, has been fielding a surge in Americans interested in acquiring villages in recent months. He chalks up the attraction of the village to three recent trends: easy internet access in remote areas through platforms like Starlink; the push away from overwhelmed tourist destinations like Florence or Barcelona; and the steep real estate prices in America spurring buyers to look further afield. His clients range from venture capitalist-backed entrepreneurs to small investment funds.
In 2021, Johannes Hoyos, a German entrepreneur, noticed that many such villages were available to rent nearly outright. He and his brother imagined a clever niche. “We said, ‘Let’s try to build a company around this idea of bringing people into villages.’” Today their company, Campfire, has organized village retreats for teams from companies including Dell, Google and Netflix, mostly in southern Europe. As some C.E.O.s seek slow disconnection from daily distractions over flashy resort packages, they and others see abandoned European villages as the next hot spot for corporate retreats. “Remote work made monthlong stays normal,” says Negru. “Teams want quarterly off-sites that aren’t generic hotels.” Matteo Cerri, whose company, ITS Italy, is working to refurbish two dozen villages for use as corporate retreats and other tourism ventures, has also seen an uptick in interest from both renters and buyers. “It mostly works in terms of connections,” he says. “A guy knows a guy at, say, Y Combinator, who wants to spend 10 days in a village.” Some find the idea of acquiring an entire village distasteful or worry that it will lead to a “Disneyfication” of rural Europe. These concerns aren’t new: Giancarlo Dall’Ara, an Italian marketing professor, developed a framework to prevent gaudy development in depopulated rural areas as far back as the ’80s.
If villages are growing as a corporate retreat attraction, Dall’Ara says, it is because “they offer an authentic environment that appeals to organizations tired of standardized and anonymous locations.” Negru believes criticism of entrepreneurs who are buying villages misses the mark. “People forget one thing, which is that these villages have been abandoned for a long time,” he says. “It’s a good thing, if everything is done properly, for foreign investment to come in and give these villages a second life, provide jobs for the locals and so on.” The buying is only the first step, notes Nuno Constantino, a Portuguese entrepreneur. “The major cost is not acquiring the land, it’s the cost of renovation,” he says. That stage, he notes, can be “a nightmare.” His company, Wotels, manages a renovated village in southern Portugal called Aldeia da Pedralva. The property, which cost around €5 million to purchase and renovate, features a restaurant and a cafe, 38 rooms for guests and a reception area. Wotels also own the main plaza, which dates to the late 1800s, and the company is working with the municipality to convert the original school into a museum-cum-event-space. To rent out the whole thing costs upward of €7,000 per day in the summer — less than what many companies spend on urban conference hotels.
But the appeal is about more than competitive costs, Hoyos, of Campfire, says. He ties the rising popularity of villages to the epidemic of loneliness plaguing the developed world. “‘Village’ is this old notion of a small, tight knit community that’s embedded in nature,” he said. “There is the priest, the mayor, the carpenter and they all live their lives together.” In his view, the pull of the village for companies, especially ones that have gone fully remote, is a kind of “counterreaction” to the disarray and atomization of modern life. Whether abandoned villages become the next corporate retreat hot spot or just another real estate curiosity will depend on whether companies see disconnection as a quarterly necessity or an inconvenient indulgence (remote areas are, by definition, a pain to reach). But some are hopeful. The village, once abandoned because it couldn’t keep up with the economic demands of modern life, might be valuable again precisely because it offers an escape from them.
Kevin Warsh is Trump’s pick for Fed chair. If confirmed by the Senate, Warsh would take over as chair when Jerome Powell’s term expires in May. On Wednesday, Fed officials — who are under relentless pressure from Trump to make borrowing cheaper — opted to hold rates steady at their first gathering of the year. The Senate passed a bipartisan spending package. It would fund much of the government and keep the Department of Homeland Security running for two weeks while negotiations continue over Democrats’ demands to rein in federal immigration agents. The package, which must still be cleared by the House, did not come together in time to avert a brief lapse in federal funding over the weekend, starting on Saturday morning. Millions of pages of Epstein documents were released. The Justice Department on Friday posted three million more pages of documents from its Jeffrey Epstein files, as well as thousands of videos and images. The documents arrived weeks after a Dec. 19 deadline imposed by Congress for the department to make nearly all of those investigative files public. Big Tech reported earnings. Meta and Microsoft both continue to spend big on A.I. But the reaction from investors differed. Despite beating Wall Street expectations, Microsoft’s shares fell after its A.I. business did not show big gains. Meta’s stock rose 10 percent in after-hours trading following its earnings report, which showed evidence that A.I. was helping its advertising business. More big deals: OpenAI is said to be planning a fourth-quarter I.P.O. Amazon is said to be negotiating an investment of up to $50 billion in OpenAI. The U.S. trade deficit ballooned again. And social media giants face trials over whether their products are addictive. How companies weigh what to sayAs the world grapples with the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents in Minneapolis, C.E.O.s and corporate boards have been wrestling with a question that has come up a lot in recent years: Should they say something? (Andrew on Monday argued they should.) Steve Lipin, the founder and C.E.O. of the communications advisory Gladstone Place Partners, has played a role in some of those conversations. He talked with DealBook’s Sarah Kessler about how companies are weighing whether or not to speak out. The interview has been condensed and edited. What are you hearing from C.E.O.s about when and how they should speak out? Just look at the last few years, the killing of George Floyd, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Hamas attacks on Israel, the Georgia voting rights laws — all of these topics and more have required C.E.O.s and leaders to try to answer this question of whether to weigh in. And I’d say the pendulum has been swinging, and the business community is learning through trial and error that in no way could it weigh in on every social and political topic. If I weigh in on this topic, well, then does that mean I need to weigh in on the next topic? And so there is a little bit of reverting to the mean. What is the criteria for deciding which issues merit a statement? How does a particular incident impact your business and your people? That’s the lens through which C.E.O.s and management are looking at these crises. How much does fear of retaliation from the Trump administration factor in? The administration is obviously very pro-business, but it’s also very pro-interventionist. And so yes, there is also caution looking at it from a political lens. Business leaders and C.E.O.s and their advisers and their boards don’t want to be publicly attacked by the administration. That doesn’t mean that they’re not going to do it. It just means that they are weighing all these puts and takes before deciding what to do. What do you think of the responses so far? There has been criticism of the letter that the business community from Minnesota put together, that it didn’t attack the federal government. Well, of course it didn’t, because what the business community wants is to allow their communities to thrive, their businesses to thrive. I thought that a letter from a wide group of business leaders was absolutely the right thing to do. It sent a signal. It got picked up. It gave business leaders a way to weigh in without feeling like they’re sticking their neck out in a highly, highly, highly politicized, highly charged moment in this country. What about responses from individual companies? There have been questions about, did Tim Cook and Sam Altman say enough? And I think we should take business leaders at their word in the sense of, when somebody says they’re heartbroken, they’re truly heartbroken. And was it too little too late? I didn’t think so. As a C.E.O., you don’t want to further divide society or even your own company. You don’t want to do it to be performative. Is there a point where silence is not an option? The Target C.E.O. is a good example where silence wasn’t an option, both because of the killings in his community and because of ICE raids that were in his stores. The general public views big companies as having influence, and therefore some think they have a responsibility to use it. I would argue the business community is and will be using its soft power. What does that look like? I’m not saying there’s not a moment to talk about this publicly. But in terms of actually solving the problems, soft power is engaging with members of Congress, with the administration, with the White House, governors and mayors. Soft power is problem-solving behind the scenes, not always taking a public stand. Quiz: Domestic troopsThe Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday responded to a request from Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, to estimate how much President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to six U.S. cities last year cost taxpayers. Trump’s use of the state-based troops — who are typically deployed at the request of governors to respond to emergencies such as natural disasters — provoked lawsuits from state and local leaders, and he eventually abandoned his efforts in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. The C.B.O. estimated that continuing National Guard deployments that were active as of the end of last year would cost about how much? A. $13 million per month B. $23 million per month C. $93 million per month Find the answer at the bottom of this newsletter. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Quiz answer: C. Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow. 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