Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

We’ve been rolling out our marketing campaign to pull in more entries on our B&B listings sites over the last few weeks and it’s interesting to see how differently the offers have been taken up.

First off, the Spanish began with a vast number of duff addresses which implies that a lot of them don’t bother with e-mail for their bookings. Virtually all of the addresses were from free accounts like hotmail and the Spanish equivalents which also implies that they’re not really using the Internet as a primary means of promoting their businesses. Overall takeup was really low at around 0.5% although, to be fair, it’s my first attempt to do a mailshot in Spanish so I wasn’t expecting an overlly high response. What did surprise me was that they looked at the example sites I quoted in really big numbers and also clicked on the various ads that they came across.

This was my second major mailshot aimed at Scotland. The first, about a year ago had a fairly low takeup but this one completely took me by surprise and the takeup has been over 3%. By contrast, they didn’t look much at the example sites nor did they click on the ads: they just went ahead and either signed up right off or passed on the offer.

It’s my first run at Ireland too and early days with that as yet. What has surprised me already though is that a much lower number of places quote an e-mail than I’d expected. In fact, the Internet presence seems largely to be confined to B&Bs with hotels not bothering to quote either an e-mail or a website. Still, we’ll see about Ireland over the coming week.

Next up is England and Wales which I hope to do over the coming week or two. It should provide an interesting contrast with Scotland where I went from fairly low numbers a few weeks ago to quite a sizeable and growing presence today.

Whilst it’s easy enough to come up with a price for a house in a town where there are a lot of similar houses around and a regular turnover, it’s an entirely different matter in rural France.

For a start, once you get into the countryside, houses aren’t all the same. Even two similar looking cottages won’t come with the same price attached because they’ll be in different locations with different views and so on. And, of course, they’ll not be the same inside either nor will they have been equally well maintained. Finally, there just isn’t the regularity of turnover of housing in the French countryside as you get in a typical town in the UK.

So how do the French price their houses? Well, first off they look around at the various estate agent brochures that seem to be in every place you could possibily find them. The French don’t have a single estate agent selling a property usually so there are even more brochures than you might expect.

They look for vaguely similar houses to what they have to sell and take a view on whether their’s is worth more or less than the price being asked. What they don’t do usually is to ask the estate agent what the price should be and therefore the prices listed aren’t necessarily realistic. In fact, most are actually conversions from some relatively arbitrary figure in French francs with the estate agent commission being added on (hence the slightly peculiar sums that you sometimes see being asked).

So, don’t take the price in the estate agents brochure as gospel. It’s usually not based on any firm idea of what the house should be worth so you may well be able to negotiate either the price or what’s included in the price.

We’ve been looking around the prices of places locally and there’s quite a divergence between what some places are actually worth and what they might sell for at the moment.

For example, there’s a major hotel/restaurant complex near us that’s listed for almost EUR 2.5 million. It’s easily worth that as it’s a recently modernised building with over 30 rooms, large swimming pool, gardens, sports facilities, has a second building under construction to add another 30 rooms and planning permission for a third building for the complex plus extensive grounds.

Unfortunately, that complex is totally out of character with the region. There’s nothing comparable to it locally and for good reason: there just isn’t the market for it here.

So, whilst it might well be worth 2.5 million (and probably more), chances are that it’ll sell for around 1.5 million or so. That’s if it sells at all, of course, as it’s nothing like what people would expect in this area which means that nobody is looking to buy such a facility here.

I’m just about to start the final course of my modern languages degree and although it’s actually the English course whereas all the others were in foreign languages, I’m finding that I’m dreading that first tutorial just the same!

Still, at least I shouldn’t find myself wanting to ask a question yet not knowing what the words are which can happen sometimes in the foreign language tutorials. It’ll be the very first tutorial that I’ve done in english for over 15 years so I’m sure it’ll feel a little bit peculiar.

In fact the first tutorial is a couple of days before the official starting date for the course so I’m not sure what we’ll be getting up to in it. Also it’s supposed to be an e-learning course so I’m not sure why there are any in-person tutorials at all although to be fair there are only four of them listed whereas normally there’d be something like twice that number for a course at this level.

In years gone by people might think you a little crazy to buy a professional SLR but at least you could keep taking photos with it for many years to come and indeed I still have my Nikon F3 bought shortly after they came out in 1980 and it takes photos just as well now as it did then.

Digital cameras are a different matter though.

I’ve a couple of photos taken with a professional digital camera way back in 1997. The £2000 camera used to take them was the top of the line at the time and yet these days the 640×480 resolution would be laughed at as even the cheapest of digital cameras can better that.

It’s the same today too. You can spent £3400 on a new Nikon D3 and bask in the luxury of 12.8mp images. On the other hand you could spend around £400 on a Nikon D40X and have pretty respectable 10mp images. That’s not to say that the extra 2.8mp isn’t worth having but rather that chances are that the successor to the D40X will probably cost around the £400 mark and offer it potentially as soon as next year; certainly two years on and the D40X’s successor will have a good deal higher resolution than the D3 and more than likely still be around 10% of the price.

So, as with computers, the best strategy is probably to buy the cheapest DSLR in the range with a view to replacing it in, say, two or three years time with the latest edition of the same model.