Foreign Perspectives

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When the Brits are moving to France their first thought, usually, is to set themselves up in the gite business.

It certainly sounds like the ideal lifestyle choice. You only need to work one day a week and you don’t have to see the guests at all apart from when they arrive and when they leave. For B&B you’d have to deal with the guests every day and that would be an awful hassle, wouldn’t it?

What’s frequently forgotten about in this equation is that a typical gite will have around six or seven rooms whereas a B&B room has only two (counting the bathroom in both cases). So you’re looking at around three to four times the amount of work cleaning up a gite compared to a single B&B room (although most gites specify that it’s left in a clean condition you’ll still need to check it and wash all the sheets etc.).

Don’t forget about that business of washing the sheets & towels, maintenance, etc.: a gite business is never a one day a week job.

The other difference that’s usually not even considered is the profitability. We have a small four person gite and when rented out as a gite, the income is around EUR 50 per day. When the same space (less the kitchen and dining room) is rented out as a B&B room then the income is EUR 100 per day and if we do an evening meal as well it’s more like EUR 200 per day.

To be fair, that separation of you from the guests is valuable for a number of people but it’s possible to buy a B&B place that allows you to lock the door and keep the guests from mingling with the private section of your house.

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Hard money is a slightly odd type of real estate mortgage in that rather than treating the property as a long term investment as most typical mortgage places do, it’s intended for quick turnover.

This obviously changes the valuation criteria considerably and it’s based on the quick-sale value of the property rather than the normal wooly valuation that a realtor may come up with. Since it is quite short-term financing, it therefore will usually come with a higher APR calculated interest rate although that’s not overlly relevant as this is very much short term financing thus a very high APR doesn’t equate to equally high interest payments over the term of the loan.

In the hard money marketplace you don’t want to be fussing around with brokers and since it’s quite a specialised business it’s best to run with a nationwide hard money lender in that they’ll have both more experience and more financial backing. Commercial hard money works on a similar basis although, of course, there are many more variants in loan types comprising the likes of bridge loans, construction pay off loans, foreclosure bailouts, purchases and foreign national purchases: essentially all the types of loan that banks have difficulty in approving through their normal channels.

Anyway from Arizona hard money to New York hard money you can arrange it surprisingly fast through LV Hard Money.

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As you know, we’ve been plugging away with sponsored posts on various blogs over the last year or so.

The money can be quite good sometimes (we picked up $250 on a single post a month ago for example) but most of the time it’s around the $10 to $30 mark. Not that we’re complaining but once you’ve been paid for the article, that’s the last income that you get for it.

So, what we’re having a go at now is a fresh attack on the affiliate links through Personally Chosen which we’ve not really looked at for a few years.

In practical terms, we’re planning it as a series of product reviews much as we do for the sponsored posts but with the difference that there’s no upfront payout but, hopefully, an ongoing income from them. If we can get it right, there’s certainly big money in it as some affiliate signups pay over $50.

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