Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

We’re in the process of thinking about where we might move after we sell this place and one place that’s come into the frame is Scotland.

Now you might think that moving house in the UK is simple enough but in fact the house buying process in Scotland is so different from that in the rest of the UK, it’s better to think of it just as you would a move to a foreign country. That mindset means that you won’t be taken by surprise by developments in the buying process as you ordinarily would be. For instance, in Scotland there is no gazumping simply because the first contract is binding.

That single difference means that if you’re moving from another country to the UK then it’s considerably easier to time your move. At the most extreme case, in Northern Ireland there’s a considerable amount of bidding that goes on which makes it virtually impossible to time a house move there at the moment.

Of course there are other considerations than the simple legal system. For one thing, if you were thinking of moving to the Hebrides then you’d probably need to learn Gaelic and, of course, throughout much of Scotland it’s Scots that’s spoken which would be hard enough to pick up if you were used to “normal” English.

Surprisingly given the market conditions, the number of people picking up posts from the blog on real estate is growing daily.

Why is that though? Surely with a relatively depressed housing market you’d think that less people would be interested in it? I suspect that the reason is that everyone is looking to catch the market turning upwards and hence the interest is even more intense now than it would ordinarily be during normal trading conditions.

Of course, the fact that a lot of people are looking for that upturn probably means that it’s some way off and certainly the messing around on the share markets recently isn’t a particularly hopeful sign.

Standing apart from the system these days we’ve not noticed first hand all of the chaos that has resulted in some of the reorganisations of UK government departments over the last year or two but can only laugh at some of it from afar.

Perhaps the best example is the Child “Tax Credit” and Child Benefit combination.

For political reasons, the Child Tax Credit is called a tax credit although, in all but name, it’s clearly a benefit payment. You claim it exactly like a benefit and it’s paid exactly like a benefit so it’s only the name that differentiates it. And that’s the problem: seeing as it’s been called a “tax credit” then it can’t be integrated with the Child Benefit systems thus saving a fortune on duplication of administrations and reducing the errors being made in payments.

That’s a recent one of course but the National Insurance Contributions have long been separate from Income Tax. The bands at which both are levied have been aligned for quite a while now so there’s no reason to keep them separate other than the political double-speak that called the National Insurance scheme an insurance scheme when in fact it’s merely another tax. If it were an insurance scheme then it would build up some money in the kitty but, of course, it doesn’t as the money is paid out as it comes in.

So when will common sense prevail and such nonsenses be put to an end? Somehow I can’t see it being anytime soon as there are just too many interested parties who it suits to have the current system perpetuated.

The little club that is the B&B owners section of the Living France forum generally tries to organise a little get together for the various owners participating on the forum timed to be a little before we’re all swamped with guests.

This year they’re aiming for a BBQ on June 15th at one of the properties in the Poitou-Charentes area. The biggest problem is, of course, that France is a vast country so even though we’re relatively close to the spot, it’s nearly five hours drive to get there for us and many people are a good deal further away than that.

Still, ’tis nice to at least get a few of the owners together to swap stories and to finally see what the people really look like!

Although you can usually assume that you’ll get around a 1% return on any marketing that you send out, now and again you can get a much better response if you happen to hit on exactly the right message and target it at exactly the right group of people at exactly the right time.

The message that you use is the one variable that you have a great deal of control over and it’s worthwhile running a test of each marketing e-mail that you plan to use in your campaigns before you send the mail to everyone on your mailing list. By testing on a small group you have the chance to modify the text and get a better feel on the level of response that you might expect which in turn let’s you stage the mailing appropriately.

Unusually for us, we decided to short-circuit that process and just send out a brand new e-mail to our latest mailing list without any prior testing which has resulted in a certain amount of chaos in the last 24 hours.

For a start, the e-mail was unexpectedly attractive to the target audience which resulted in the webserver slowing to a crawl almost immediately after the e-mail went out. The volume of people looking at the site was so great that within a few hours we used up as much bandwidth as we normally do in two days. This in turn reduced the take-up as it was so slow at times that the signup form was timing out for some people. Finally, the responses coming through were so many that it looks like it will take us an entire day to process them all.

And all this for an e-mail that was sent out in what would ordinarily be a time of week that would produce quite a low immediate response rate for us!

I think in future we’ll make more of a point in testing any new messages that we issue.