‘I retired at 50 and accidentally founded a holiday let empire in Italy'

Telegraph

2 days ago

This is part of a series about early retirement – how our readers did it, and what they are doing now. Would you like to take part? Get in touch at [e-mail].
A chance encounter gave Norma Williams the opportunity to buy a sprawling palazzo in Italy in the 1980s for just a few thousand pounds.
It seemed too good to be true. Undeterred, Williams and her then-husband took the risk and paid £12,000 to the seller who they met through a mutual friend.
They did so with little more than a promise there would be a house in Umbria, central Italy, waiting for them. ' We bought it blind, ' she recalls more than 40 years later.
But the couple were quickly given cause for regret when they finally travelled to see what they had spent their money on. 'It was a pile of stones,' Williams says, with 'no heating, lighting or electricity' that had been 'abandoned totally'.
It had been destroyed in an earthquake decades before and, according to the former owner, qualified for a government-funded grant to pay for repairs. She learnt after buying the property that the money was never going to come through.
'Me and my first husband lived in it like a tent for the first two or three years while we saved up money to fix holes in the roof,' Williams recalls.
The house, which some may have viewed as a millstone, in fact sparked a business that has paved the way for a comfortable retirement in the sun.
'Suddenly I was doing nothing'
Nowadays the former philosophy lecturer, 77, spends her winters in the Canary Islands, and her business makes up to €50,000 (£42,000) a year. But it wasn't always that way.
Williams worked in a succession of posts at educational institutions in the UK, but by her late 40s she wound down her work and initially struggled to find ways to fill the spare time. 'I was used to being quite active and very successful, and suddenly I was doing nothing.'
She quit her job as a lecturer at a higher education college in Hertfordshire in 1998 aged 50. With a pension of only £5,500 per year, Williams knew she would need to come up with extra cash to maintain a comfortable lifestyle and retire in Italy. She is now one of about 500,000 British expatriates who have retired abroad.
Luckily, when they bought the house, they stumbled on an area of the country that would soon undergo a major tourist boom. By acting as an agent for local property-owning families who want to lease their unused homes to foreign guests, Williams has taken advantage of the tourist trade and built up a small but lucrative subletting business.
In the 1980s, she and her ex-husband continued to visit the house in Umbria, slowly repairing it, and over the years built a network of contacts that would one day become her clients.
By 1991, Williams was remarried to her current husband, Laurie, who is 10 years her senior. Having divided up assets and 'split down the middle' with her ex-husband, she was able to buy the other half of the house in Italy from him.
'I had decided to sell,' she says. '[But] I told my new husband about a place in Italy and he said, 'There's no need to sell it. We'll work together'. We pooled our resources and reconstructed the house, it took about five years.' The couple had moved full-time to Italy by the late 1990s.
Williams says the 'launching pad' for leaving the UK was their London flat, which they rented to tenants to provide enough income to allow them to live in the newly renovated property in Italy. This, combined with Laurie's pension lump sum upon his retirement, cushioned their move and initially funded their life abroad.
'I started my holiday let empire by accident'
She placed her house on a holiday house-swapping website in the mid 2000s and was asked whether she would rent out a portion of her home. 'We had never thought about this before,' she says. 'We had an enormous house and we said yes.'
'This is quite an idea: to rent out bits of our house,' she said of the time. 'We started just by accident [and then] started to advertise it.'
Williams spied an opportunity and devised a plan to sub-let apartments in their area of Umbria from locals, and offer them up as holiday lets to the increasing numbers of tourists.
'We ended up doing that with 15 holiday properties and we were the main renters of Spoleto apartments. We helped open it up to the rest of the world.
'At the same time, Italians became very interested in Spoleto – it started to explode at exactly the same time as we started subletting all our properties on the holiday rental market.' Before long, she had set up her business, Umbria Holiday Rentals.
'Italian taxes are excruciating'
The sudden demand from locals seeking to use spare properties as a holiday lets meant she had to raise her standards significantly.
Williams takes charge of the day-to-day running of their business, which involves finding local contractors who can help guests throw parties and host weddings in the properties. She also manages the stays of guests and acts as a middleman between her partners and the local property owners. Her husband takes charge of the finances.
Williams estimates that her business can earn anywhere between €20,000 to €50,000 a year, before tax. 'It's a small business, but Italian taxes are very high,' she says. 'It just grew and grew over the last 25 years, sometimes we earn a lot more, but the more you earn the less you earn. Italian taxes are excruciating.
'Anyone who starts a business in Italy has got to really love what they do, because you're basically working for nothing. You are taxed at every twist and turn of the way.'
Taxpayers in Italy can be caught by three levels of taxation. These are a national income tax, worth between 23pc to 43pc, and then regional and municipal taxes that can vary. Italy also has a flat tax regime for expat retirees of 7pc, though this only applies to income and pensions that are from outside the country.
Williams says she will carry on running her business for the foreseeable future. 'The most important thing is to pick the people you are going to work with with a fine tooth comb,' she says.