Foreign Perspectives

We get a relatively low rate of turnover of the properties listed on our sites but one thing that always amazes me is that the seller never passes on the information about the advertising they’d done to the new owner.

In pretty much all cases that sale is a straight sale of the business so you’d think that the new owner would want to retain the existing customer base yet never once have we been contacted by a new owner wanting to revive the site through changing the contact details to their own, perhaps a new description, or whatever. In fact, in most cases that we follow up the very first thing that the new owners do is to change the name of the business and change all the contact details so they are pretty much guaranteed to lose all the existing customer base.

For the first time today we by chance caught one of the new owners via a general mailshot. Their first thought was to delete the advert rather than simply change the contact details even though the subscription has already been covered by the previous owner.

So, even if you are planning on changing how the business that you’ve just bought operates, do ask about the advertising and try to get a list of places that it’s advertised in. You may find that ongoing advertising has been paid for in advance so you may as well just change the contact details even if you don’t plan to renew it next time around.