Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Although we’re now well into the marketing season for B&B and self-catering listings sites, the usual wave of marketing e-mails from such places is quite noticeable in its absence this year.

Last year was a little unusual to be fair as maisoneurope.com had a new owner and he was firing out e-mails like there was no tomorrow several times a month at least and sometimes several times per week. This year, that particular factor is absent for the moment though presumably he’ll be getting going again in the not too distant future provided he’s not gone bust on the adwords campaigns that he was running. Whether he was successful at it or not remains to be seen but the site has never yet come up on ordinary searches that I’ve done myself so I’m a bit doubtful. Still, perhaps the adwords to sell the properties combined with the subscription income from them is enough to keep things ticking along nicely.

This year, all that’s appeared sporadically has been an e-mail from frenchentree.com who are expanding their site with rental listings. The pricing doesn’t really work for B&B so I’ve not bothered with them as yet but if their six months free offer is still around in February I’ll probably take them up on it.

Our own sites don’t have offers as such in that they’re free all the time which has caused us problems in roping in new entries for the crazy reason that people figure that if it’s free it doesn’t have any worth. Consequently, we added the option of paying us £29 per year which by placing a value on the listings meant that we started to pull in more people than before.

Of course, that begs the question: if I raised the notional price to, say, £129 would that bring even more people in?

Indeed, if I listed it as a six months free offer would I pull in really big numbers of new entries?

I’m toying with the idea of doing something along these lines on one of our new-generation sites – either Inns4u or perhaps, when I get around to updating it, Our French Chateau (which gets a surprising number of hits even now).

Marketing a B&B is usually a Winter-time activity as you’re just too busy to do much about it during the Summer season when you’re full with guests.

So, as we edge out of the shoulder-season (which can be quite busy), we’re edging into the marketing season and therefore the arrival of e-mails offering to advertise your B&B and bring you thousands of bookings if only you’ll pay a few hundred pounds to list your place.

Last year, I thought I’d have a go at e-mail marketing for the listings sites that I run and was very surprised at the initial reactions that I got. Although the sites are free to list, or rather because they are free to list, several people were very suspicious about them in their replies to my e-mails. So, I had a think about this and added a charging option which interestingly helped me pull in a lot more entries than when it was totally free!

Funnily enough, only one person has ever paid for a subscription to the site yet it seems necessary to have a charge sitting there so that people give their free listing a value ie they are saving £29 per year. The value is even better this year though as I now offer to pay those listed for any recommendations that come via them.

Anyway, I’ve fired off my first batch of e-mails to B&Bs in Scotland last night and it’s already pulled in a dozen or so new entries which is pretty good going for the first day and, all being well, they’ll be trickling in over the rest of the week.

When I put on my post about opening an American bank as a non-resident, I was amazed at the number of people who checked it out and of those quite a number would like to know how to open a Swiss account.

Opening accounts in both America and Switzerland used to be very easy but with increasing anti-terrorism legislation around the world many banks felt that they could no longer cope with the additional identity checks that the legislation seems to require of them. I say “seems” because it doesn’t really require any more of them than it does of someone living next door to the branch but they generally don’t make a whole lot of money on non-resident accounts anyway so it’s easier for them to use “the law” as an excuse to say no to non-residents.

However, for most “normal” countries all you actually need is a proof of address (ie an electricity or landline phone bill) plus a copy of your passport (usually this must be certified). More obscure countries sometimes ask for an apostile which is more of a hassle to provide.

For America, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, the only things required are the proof of address and passport. In the case of America, 9/11 has meant that the banks prepared to open an account with minimal hassle has reduced drastically but includes Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC and, the ever-present, e-trade. Aside from e-trade, it’s easier to open an account with one of these banks if you already have an account with them in your own country and you may have one already as Bank of America issues a lot of credit cards in Europe under the MBNA name.

In the case of the UK, it’s easier to open a non-resident account with one of the branches in the offshore islands (Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man or Gibraltar) as they are more accustomed to dealing with non-resident accounts. Don’t worry about that “offshore” tag as those islands banking systems are fully integrated with the mainland.

For Switzerland it’s generally fairly easy though some banks will now refuse non-resident accounts due to the expense of running them whilst others will charge you extra. You cannot open an account with SwissPoste these days, despite numerous websites listing it as a possibility and indeed charging you for the privilege of providing you with the information. The major banks (UBS, Credit Suisse) will still permit non-resident accounts and are unlikely to stop doing so as a large proportion of their client-base is non-resident but now charge around SF 75 per year to maintain the accounts if you’re non-resident. However, if you just want a Swiss account by far the best appears to be via SwissQuote which is a free multi-currency account and offers the option of a debit card too (there’s a charge for the debit card).

What are Certified & Apostilles? To get a document certified, you usually just need to go along to your bank and have them stamp the copy and write “original seen” on it. Sometimes banks ask for it to be certified by a lawyer but usually a bank is sufficient for them. An apostille is a certification that the person doing the original certification is known and what’s asked for usually is a “state-level” apostille. This means, usually, that you need to send off your passport to the department of your home government which deals with international affairs (usually called the State Department but is the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the UK) who will provide you with an apostilled copy.

If you’re interesting in more details on these options, either subscribe to this category here (international-banking) or check out the information on our Expat Banking site. I’ll be slowly but surely working through the various countries here and on that site, the next being Switzerland and after that probably the offshore British islands.

Rental prices tend to lag the corresponding rises in house prices, essentially because rental contracts are generally 6 to 12 months in duration.

With the incredibly strong rise in house prices in Northern Ireland over the last year to 18 months it could only be expected that the rents being asked for would make a move after the customary time lag. Now, the house prices have levelled off at the moment but that’s not stopped the rents starting to shift upwards.

For example, in one estate which we have a vested interest in, a typical house was £130k in September 2006 vs £225k now. The increase in rents being asked is also heading upwards over that time from a typical £425 last year to £495 now. So far that’s only a 16% rental increase compared to the 73% price rise but I suspect that it’s merely a taster of things to come from the landlords as they test the water for reactions to that rise. Certainly if the prices of the houses resume their progress upwards I would be surprised if there wasn’t a certain amount of catching up happening this time next year with the rents.

If you think that British ATMs are complicated beasties, you should look at some of the Spanish ones.

For one thing, they’re easily twice the size of the UK ones. That’s not because they’re ancient but because they have seemingly millions of different functions. Whereas in the UK, a bank ATM has basically three slots (card, money and receipt) and a UK building society machine adds two extra slots to deal with deposits, the Spanish variety has all kinds of slots and it takes a few seconds even to find where you’ve to stick your card in.

These days ATMs are quite sophisticated and generally work out what language you speak from the card you’ve inserted rather than asking you which language you’d like. However, that’s frequently a step too far when it’s an expat wielding the card as you may well not be using a card from your own country when you’re on holiday or just travelling.

It’s certainly something that the French machines don’t allow for. The machines usually ask you what language you want but revert to French if you use a French card regardless of which language you select!