People looking for an urban property – whether it’s a shack in a slum or the finest Manhattan penthouse – tend to want to stay in it for a lot longer than the short-term tenants typical to a holiday destination. While short-term lets aren’t unknown in urban areas, they’re few and far between compared with longer-term stays. After all, tenants in cities are almost always looking for somewhere to live, rather than somewhere just to stay for a few days. Jobs, family, studies: all these things require a base, and whether for months or for years this base, once chosen, becomes home.

For the owner, this means a huge drop in marketing costs as tenants need to be found once every few months, or years, rather than every week. It also means, in consequence, added security (because once you’ve found your tenant, assuming they don’t suddenly have to leave, you’ve got a steady flow of income, week after week, month after month) and the great likelihood of decreased maintenance costs (because tenants who know they’re going to have to live in a property for months or even years tend to be a lot more respectful of it than those who know they’ll be leaving in a week or two and might be spending that time living it up to their hearts’ content, with all the associated damage that can produce). Of course, owners can safeguard against damage by taking deposits – but an owner looking to cram a year’s-worth of mortgage payments plus profit into a short rental season would hardly appreciate having to spend a week or two cleaning up after nightmare tenants even with a deposit safely in the bank.

Now, you may be asking: if city properties are so excellent, why is the market still so dominated by the traditional lifestyle model? There are many reasons, but two stand out as being the most important. Firstly, most buyers – however investment-minded they might think they are, or want to be – are still looking for properties they can use themselves as well as wring a profit from. And urban homes, even in the world’s most glamorous cities, don’t provide the same holiday and leisure assets as beach houses, ski chalets and the like – especially for buyers who might already spend all their lives in hectic, bustling metropolises. The get-away-from-it-all factor is still extremely important. Unless you’re looking to live in it, an urban property should be seen as an investment, pure and simple. Only when a buyer has adopted that mindset will she or he be best-placed to make the very most – the biggest profit - from a property investment.