Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Just as there never seems to be a single bus around, so too it seems to be with house buyers.

With the market having slowed down considerably in the UK, selling in markets that are dependent on that market is also pretty slow. However, that seems to be changing as we’ve now had three quite serious house views in the space of two weeks.

Now, if only we can persuade one to part with a large cheque…

We’ve had our place listed with several estate agents for a while now and had sort-of settled into the thinking that it would sell “sometime” but probably not that soon.

These days, you get a lot of “window shoppers” when you’re trying to get a decent price for your place and we’ve had our share of those through normal estate agents.

However, one estate agent that we listed with some time ago and heard nothing from since got in touch last week to see about a visit on Saturday. They’d said at the outset that they pre-vet purchasers to the extent of checking in advance not only what they’re looking for but also that they’ve got the resources to pay for it and made a point of saying that they’d only be around with “serious buyers”.  Total estate-agent speak if ever there was an example of it we thought.

The call was surprising on several fronts. We’d not heard from them in ages so figured that they’d forgotten about us which was a shame as we’d originally thought that they would be the people who’d sell it for us. More surprising in some ways was that the appointment was for Saturday morning: I always figured that estate agents were strictly Monday to Friday people but apparently not.

Although our place is pretty large, usually we’d people round it in maybe an hour and then a little chat afterwards. These people were here well over two hours and were only asking the kind of questions that you’d ask if you were pretty serious about a place: can we buy that land for a pool?, can we build on that section? and so on.

We still don’t know if they’ll buy the place as they’d seen several other places in the area but the estate agent was talking of getting an architect in to see how much the changes they’d like would cost. If they run to that, I think we may need to start preparing for a fairly quick move as they seemed very proactive.

We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with.

First off was the establishment of our foothold in America which currently consists mainly of our French vacation listings site, our French B&B site, our global accommodation site and our global travel guide. That’s our initial collection and we’re hoping that over the next few months the traffic on those will start to catch up with that on their Europe counterparts.

Next was an upgrade to the new version of the listings which gives the property owners a little six page website instead of the previous single page version. That’s phase one of a more significant upgrade which’ll let us offer to build custom websites for vacation properties.

And finally, now that we’ve a proper American hosting service it was the turn of a couple of blogs to head west as their content is more appropriate for an American audience.

Where does all this stuff live now? Well, to give us a bit of contingency we’re using Lunarpages for most of the sites but have kept 3ix for one site as a backup in that one thing that was very clear when we read the various reviews of sites was that it was always prudent to retain a second hosting service. For that purpose, 3ix seems ideal in that their base plan is all of $12 per year which is comparable to the monthly charge of some services and frankly seems the ideal service if you’ve only got one site and don’t mind that it’s hosted in America.

That’s us basically settled down now though I see that WordPress have yet another new version out so we’ll be moving onto that with the various blogs over the next few weeks or so (no big rush though).

Over the next few days it’s going to be pretty hectic here as the Spanish are coming, as usual for their pre-Easter break.

Also, as usual, they wait ’til the last minute to book. Just a few weeks ago, we had nobody down for the next few days yet as of tomorrow we’re pretty much full until Monday and everyone is from Spain.

The last minute business seems to be getting worse each year as we had several days worth of bookings arriving this morning including the first double booking for the year. The last minute aspect is something that none of the booking systems are really geared up for in that it can be several hours between the guest booking and the system notifying us of that booking which, of course, is plenty of time for a competing reservation system to slip in another booking for the same dates.

Since it’s St Patrick’s Day, we thought it was a great day to add our entry for Downpatrick on our world guide where, argueably, he’s buried under a massive stone in the chuch graveyard.

Naturally, there’s nothing on over here for St Patrick’s and we were hoping to get over to Dublin for the parades but, yet again, didn’t quite manage it between one thing and another.

As it happens though, by far the largest parade is in New York!