Nomad's own 2024 Real Estate Yield Index (103 countries) is the anchor -- unchanged. Four independently sourced pillars are added on top, each scaled 0-100 and combined at the weights below. A country missing one measure inside a pillar is scored on the measures it has, never zero-filled.
| Pillar | Weight | Coverage | The named evidence behind it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yield & Affordability | 35% | 103/103 | Nomad's own Real Estate Yield Index 2024: gross rental yield, price-to-income ratio, loan affordability, round-trip transaction cost |
| Property Rights & Legal Security | 20% | 100/103 | Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of the World legal-system sub-indicators (property rights, judicial independence, integrity, contract enforcement), embedded in the Human Freedom Index dataset |
| Market Momentum | 20% | 74/103 | OECD Analytical House Price Indicators (real, 2015-2025, 46 countries) supplemented by Global Property Guide's house-price-change series for a further 28 |
| Safety & Stability | 15% | 98/103 | Global Peace Index 2026 |
| Investment & Residency Access | 10% | 22/103 | Public RBI/CBI programme disclosures |
Unlike the Lifestyle Index, Nomad already publishes a complete, scored Real Estate Yield Index -- there was no need to build a fresh universe. The job here was to test whether Nomad's own yield-only view holds up once legal security, safety, investment access and market momentum are layered in, and where it doesn't.
Every pillar weight was perturbed by ±5 percentage points, ten times over. Worst-case Spearman rank correlation vs. baseline: 0.989. UAE holds #1 or #2 across every single perturbation tested -- the ranking is a function of the underlying data, not the specific weights chosen. A further 5,000-trial Monte Carlo simulation goes deeper still -- see the full rank-confidence check for which ranks are solid and which are still soft.
Before publishing, Nomad's own Gross Rental Yield figures were checked against two independent sources: Numbeo's Property Prices Index by Country and Global Property Guide's Rental Yields by Country. Across the 75 countries all three sources cover, the mean absolute difference is a modest 1.15 percentage points, and Nomad's figures run slightly below the independent average overall -- this is not a dataset with a systematic house bias.
| Country | Nomad 2024 | Numbeo (outside centre) | Global Property Guide | Gap vs. independent avg. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Arab Emirates (#1 overall) | 12.2% | 8.2% | 4.9% | +5.63pp |
| Puerto Rico (#3 overall) | 10.9% | 6.2% | 8.5% | +3.57pp |
| Cyprus | 9.4% | 7.0% | 4.9% | +3.46pp |
Every metric is scaled 0-100 across the 103-country universe, inverting it where lower is better (price-to-income ratio, round-trip cost, GPI score, RBI/CBI threshold). A pillar sub-score is the mean of whichever metrics are available; when a whole pillar is missing for a country, the remaining pillar weights are renormalised.
| Investment & Residency Access coverage is only 22/103 -- a real structural finding: most CBI-heavy Caribbean microstates aren't in Nomad's own real-estate universe at all, and most countries Nomad does track don't offer a programme. |
| Market Momentum coverage is 74/103 -- OECD's membership boundary plus Global Property Guide's own coverage ceiling. |
| Russia's #4 Market Momentum ranking is a real OECD data point that needs careful editorial framing given the broader risk/sanctions context -- not yet resolved. |
| Yield | Nomad Real Estate Yield Index 2024 |
| Legal | Fraser Institute / Human Freedom Index |
| Momentum | OECD, Global Property Guide |
| Safety | Global Peace Index |
| Access | Official RBI/CBI programme pages |
Expert/spokesperson quotes for the executive summary and themed pages -- explicitly not fabricated in this draft. A view on framing Russia's Momentum ranking. Sign-off on the exact wording of the UAE/Puerto Rico callout above.