Interest in the coastal Spanish town is booming, thanks to the rise of remote work, the area’s LGBTQ-friendly atmosphere and its proximity to Barcelona
6 min
In their post pandemic search for a European second home, Florida’s Martin and Patricia Tantow had a lot of boxes to tick.
The couple, who confined their search to the mainland Mediterranean coast, wanted sea views, walkable beach and town access, and a unit that was easy to renovate—or, as they call it, a “liveable fixer-upper.”
They found what they were looking for in Sitges, a Spanish resort town that had been under the radar for U.S. buyers and vacationers.
Sitges, with around 30,000 year-round residents, is known for its sandy beaches, 19th-century villas, 21st-century mansions, quaint historic centre and thriving residential real-estate market. Only a 25-minute drive from Barcelona’s international airport, the community is one of three select resorts that compete for the title of mainland Spain’s most expensive.
Home prices in Sitges average $457 per square foot, up 7.3% in the past year and 21% in the past five years, according to Idealista, a Spanish real estate website. Jesús Encinar, CEO and chairman of Idealista, says that Cadaqués, up the Catalan coast from Sitges and near France, is now at the top, with average prices in March reaching $575 per square foot. Málaga in the south of Spain is now at $458 per square foot, edging past Sitges.
Of the three, Sitges is the most convenient for trans-Atlantic air connections—and, local homeowners say, year-round charm. Smaller and less glitzy than Marbella, Sitges has temperate winters and hot summers, and it’s bigger and more accessible than remote whitewashed Cadaqués, where life dies down in the chillier offseason.
The Tantows paid 1.3 million euros (about $1.39 million) in July 2023 for a compact 2,300-square-foot Sitges home on a steep 1/5th-acre lot, offering prized southern exposures and expansive sea views. They plan to divide their time about equally between their primary Sarasota, Fla., home and Spain, where they can work remotely.
Able to live in the 1990s property while wrapping up the renovation, the couple has spent about $270,000 on refurbishments, and they plan to spend around $50,000 more on the four-bedroom home before they’re done.
“We painted inside and outside, and we opened things up a bit by breaking down some walls,” says Patricia Tantow, a marketing executive at an IT company. Other structural improvements included new solar panels, energy-efficient doors and windows, and insulation upgrades. They also decided to convert a lower-level gym into a home office and gaming area.
The couple, both 50, view the investment as a vacation home for now and a potential retirement home later. Patricia Tantow still seems a bit surprised at where they ended up.
“My dream was to buy in the south of France,” she recalls. “But then I came to Sitges and there was something special here. It’s very cute, but very diverse as well—you feel like you belong here. So I changed my mind about France and said, ‘Let’s try to make this happen.’”
Long popular with the LGBTQ community, Sitges traditionally attracts second-home buyers from Northern Europe, as well as elsewhere in Spain. Now the number of American buyers is rising, says the Tantows’ agency, Lucas Fox, where in-house sales to Americans doubled in 2023 compared with the year before. The rise of remote work and LGBTQ word-of-mouth are each helping to fuel interest, says the agency.
American visitors to the town are also increasing. Marina Norwell, of Oliver’s Travels, the U.K.-based villa-rental specialists, says inquiries from the U.S. quadrupled in 2023 from the year before.
Norwell says a top choice for villa-minded Americans is a 10-bedroom country house with a saltwater swimming pool, about 15 minutes from the centre of Sitges, with a high-season weekly rate of about $18,500. Norwell says it’s popular with larger groups.
Sitges is something of a paradox, say residents. Known for its freewheeling nightlife in high season, it becomes a quieter, family-friendly community the rest of the year. The Tantows, who relocated during the pandemic from San Francisco to Florida, said they have no qualms about letting their two children, 9 and 11, explore on their own—something they couldn’t imagine back in San Francisco.
A desirable setting to raise children was also on the minds of full-time Dutch residents Ben Aquina and his wife, Carmen Aquina. The couple moved to Sitges in 2015 from the Netherlands to give their two sons, then 12 and 13, an international experience, he says.
The family rented for two years “to make sure that everything would go well with the kids,” says Aquina, a 63-year-old retired businessman. Then he and his wife, now 57, paid about $2.8 million in 2017 for a 7,000-square-foot, four-bedroom house on a ½-acre lot in a gated community near the city’s premier golf course, Club de Golf Terramar.
They spent more than $3 million on a gut renovation of the three-level property, originally built in 2004, adding everything from a new kitchen and upstairs terrace to a new outdoor pool.
“We love Sitges,” says Ben Aquina. “Life is so nice; the climate is perfect.”
Now that their sons are attending universities in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the couple has listed the home for $5.79 million, with Rachel Haslam of Lucas Fox handling the sale. They plan to downsize locally to an apartment, as well as spend more time back in Holland.
At their current asking price, the Aquinas would just about break even, but many Sitges lovers are willing to take a loss, says Jordi Carbonell, sales director for Barcelona’s surrounding areas at Engel & Völkers Spain.
Catalonia led the way in the industrialisation of Spain in the 19th century, and Sitges became a spot for Catalan magnates to build lavish summer villas, often in a style associated with architect Antoni Gaudí up the coast in Barcelona. Still expensive to buy, and often very expensive to modernize, they typically need a new kitchen and new air-conditioning system, and even a new roof, requiring a total investment of almost $10 million to $11 million, says Carbonell. New owners may never resell for that price, he adds, “but some people just love these properties.”
Carbonell says the highest square-foot prices can now be found on Passeig Maritim, the palm-lined boulevard bordering the beach. In 2023, Lucas Fox sold a 1,930-square-foot contemporary apartment on the boulevard’s continuation, Passeig de la Ribera, for $1.6 million, or $831 per square foot, far exceeding the resort’s average.
Both the Tantows and the Aquinas were drawn to the community’s proximity to Barcelona—“Sitges wouldn’t be Sitges without Barcelona,” says venture capitalist Martin Tantow, who says the family relies on direct flights from Miami and California. But they also use it as a getaway to the nearby Penedès wine region, home to Catalonia’s sparkling Cava wines.
Carbonell says Sitges-bound buyers who want more land often head up to Penedès, where luxury properties can come with stables and tennis courts. Meanwhile, budget-minded international buyers who want access to Sitges but more space for their euro are increasingly heading a 15-minute drive away to nearby communities, Sant Pere de Ribes, closer to the vineyards, and Vilanova i la Geltrú, a small city down the coast, where “you can spend 450,000 euros on a home but still enjoy Sitges on the weekends,” he says.
Mary Anne Gibbons and Michael Healy, a couple in their early 70s from Washington, D.C., recently capped off an Iberian holiday with a first-time visit to Sitges, opting for an Oliver’s Travels villa near Sant Pere de Ribes, where they paid around $1,400 in total for four nights in a three-bedroom renovated stone house.
Intending to use the setting as a base for discovering Barcelona, Gibbons says they opted most days to hang out in Sitges instead.
“It’s a really cute town with a very relaxed atmosphere,” says the attorney, who enjoyed the seafront promenade and quaint shops and cafes. “Very chill.”
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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
