The investors no one in your region is calling
UK inward investment rests on too few sources. A large, patient pool of capital sits almost untouched, and it flows elsewhere out of habit, not merit.
The UK's inward investment numbers look healthy; the country held its place as Europe's second-largest destination for investment last year. However, the total fell fourteen percent, and a quarter of what did arrive came from a single source: the United States. India is now second. The headline is strong; the base of investors behind it is narrow, and it is narrowing further.
It is the same story in property, the market much of this capital actually buys into. Knight Frank data shows the UK is the most-invested real estate market in Europe for overseas capital, with cross-border money making up close to half of all UK commercial property investment. But that capital comes from a familiar handful of regions: North America, the Gulf, parts of Asia.
There is a second kind of concentration, too. London has been the world's leading destination for cross-border real estate investment for five years running. Spreading inward investment across the regions, into the places where new housing and innovation capacity is most needed, is now an explicit national priority, and it will not happen by leaving the investor base as narrow as it is.
The government's answer is the right one: a more diversified, more resilient base of investors, and one that reaches beyond London. The question every region should be asking is where that diversity actually comes from. One answer is hiding in plain sight.
Latin American family offices and high-net-worth investors hold trillions in private wealth. They are patient, relationship-led, and drawn to stable jurisdictions with strong rule of law and credible long-term places. On paper, the UK is an obvious home for that money. In practice, Latin America accounts for a negligible share of the capital flowing into UK regions today.
A habit, not a verdict
This capital is not avoiding the UK because the UK competes badly. It flows overwhelmingly to the United States, and it does so out of habit: proximity, decades of practice, dense diaspora networks, and the simple fact that the US is the destination LatAm investors already know. The UK barely registers as an option. The barrier is awareness not quality.
That distinction matters, because the two problems have very different solutions. You cannot fix invisibility with a better pitch. A region that turns up with a glossy prospectus and a yield is competing on the terms it would lose on anyway. What shifts a default is relationship, built patiently, on more than one front.
This is the discipline I have spent recent months codifying in Local Power, Global Reach, a place leaders' toolkit produced for the Commission on Devolution and Diplomacy. The Commission’s central finding is that the regions which succeed internationally do not treat investment as a single transaction to be won. They build whole-place relationships: the diaspora ties, the university collaborations, the cultural links, the civic connections that earn trust over time. Capital may be the last thing to arrive. A relationship that begins with a research partnership or a cultural exchange is what eventually makes the investment conversation possible.
That is exactly the work Latin American capital requires. You do not open a Chilean family office with a term sheet. You open it through someone it already trusts, in a conversation that starts long before money is mentioned, and you let the relationship widen and deepen from there. Done well, one introduction becomes a network.
A story worth believing, then the assets to back it
The relationship gets you into the room. What you say once you are there decides whether the money moves. And patient investors are not buying a building. They are buying conviction in a place: a credible story of renewal, an ambitious and shared direction of travel, the institutions and leadership to deliver it, and the reasons it will still be compounding value in twenty years. That conviction is what they commit to first.
So the proposition has two parts, and the order matters. A region needs a clear, compelling account of where the whole place is going, strong enough that an investor wants to be part of it. Then it needs that narrative backed by specific, investable assets: a real pipeline of schemes and sites where the capital actually goes to work. A story without a pipeline is a prospectus no one can act on. A pipeline without a story is a list of buildings competing on yield alone. The places that win patient capital have both, and they lead with the story.
Latin American capital is, in the main, real estate and hard-asset capital. It funds homes, the built environment, infrastructure and energy. Set that against what a growing innovation place actually lacks and the fit is clear. University-anchored clusters rarely lack ideas. What they lack is physical capacity: somewhere for talent to live, and the buildings that let companies scale. The housing, the lab and grow-on space, the hard fabric of an innovation district. This capital funds the bricks of growth.
Bridge building
None of this is quick, and that is the point. The regions that win this will be the ones already doing the unglamorous groundwork: knowing what they uniquely offer, organising their institutions so an investor meets one credible front door rather than a committee, and being honest about whether they are ready to receive capital or merely keen to chase it. Europe is moving to deepen its ties with Latin America, and relationships established now will hold as others arrive. First movers in a market built on trust do not just get there earliest. They get the introductions no one else can later buy.
This is the thinking behind the UK–LatAm Investment Bridge, which Recurve is developing with our investment advisory partner Acacias Capital. We want to significantly increase the flow of Latin American private capital to UK regional opportunities, and are convening a small founding cohort of UK places serious about being ready for it.
If your region is thinking hard about diversifying its investor base, I would value the conversation. You can read more and register your interest in the UK/LatAm Investment Bridge here. And if you would like a copy of Local Power, Global Reach when it is released, you can register for it below.
Sam Markey is the founder of Recurve and lead author of Local Power, Global Reach: How UK mayoral combined authorities can organise to attract investment, build research partnerships and strengthen international relationships, a toolkit produced for the Commission on Devolution and Diplomacy (coming soon).
Sign up to receive the Local Power, Global Reach toolkit on publication
A note on the figures: three different measures appear above, and they are not interchangeable. EY's Attractiveness Survey counts inward investment projects (announced investments, expansions and the like), a barometer of corporate activity rather than a total of pounds invested. The ONS measures foreign direct investment in the balance-of-payments sense, cross-border holdings of ten percent or more of a company, which excludes most direct real estate purchases and minority stakes. Knight Frank tracks cross-border capital into commercial real estate, the universe this capital mostly occupies, which the FDI measure under-counts. Latin America's small footprint holds across all three.