Foreign Perspectives

Although the main customer base for my listings sites is essentially the English speaking population of Europe, there’s an even larger English speaking population just across the Atlantic that don’t see the sites as often as they should since they’re hosted in the UK.

I have tried the sites on an American host in the past and it was a complete disaster because the main interest at the time was from people in the UK and Ireland.

However, roll on three years and I’d quite like to create a foothold in America. Not with all of the sites, of course, but rather a small selection of the sites so that I could pull in some guests from America and, for that matter, add properties from Americans too.

As a taster for this, I’ve set the geographic target for a couple of the sites in google to America and they seem to have pulled in a different audience than they had when they were fully based in the UK. However, that’s just with google and I do pretty well on both yahoo and msn.

So, I’ve been looking for a cheap hosting service that would let me move over one or two sites and I think I’ve found it in the form of 3ix who charge $12 per year. Now, “all” I have to do is to work out how to have the site over in America but with the database that supports it still in the UK.

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!

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).

Yeah, I know, boring.

However, interestingly our strategy of simply buying the cheapest available machine nearly four years back and replacing it when it was at the end of its life does appear to have been the correct one. The original one cost us around EUR 200, worked perfectly for over three years and has been replaced with another one at around the same price.

Sounds expensive? Not really. The next one up from both costs nearly 50% more and given the heavy workload we’ve been putting the machine to over the last four years I don’t believe for a minute that it would have lasted any longer.

Now, in theory, we could have gone for the extended warranty but, frankly, I don’t think they’d have honoured the agreement on the basis that we were using it for industrial scale washing (which we were).

Incidently, that extra 50% gets you quite a lot of washing programmes but doesn’t mean that the machine can actually do any more work. If you look along the washing machines on sale near you, you’ll find that all but the very expensive ones can only cope with 5kg loads.

It’s obviously impossible to name a single bank which you can choose simply because no single bank operates in every country of the world.

There are some general pointers as to how to go about choosing your bank though.

One school of thought is that you should choose the local bank with the most branches in the area which you’re moving to. That’s a reasonable approach in that for most countries there’s a charge to use ATMs that aren’t owned by your own bank so it may save you on ATM withdrawal fees. However, be wary of local banks that don’t operate internationally on a widespread basis or that don’t attract many foreign customers as you can come unstuck very easily through not having local banking practices explained to you. This even applies in many cases where banks operate English speaking branches: they might well speak English but often banking terms don’t translate well.

The other school of thought is that you should choose a bank based in your own country but with branches in your new country. This can work well in that the banking staff should be more familiar with the banking practices that you’re used to and sometimes offer good deals on money transfers to/from your home country. So, for example, if you’re American then the best choice is usually Citibank as that operates as a local bank in many countries yet retains an American feel in every location in which it operates and offers good deals on transfers between Citibank accounts in other countries. However, if you’re British, you might think that HSBC would be the way to go yet because it bills itself as “the world’s local bank” it tends to follow local banking practices more than British ones although it does offer transfers to your HSBC accounts in other countries.

Don’t forget that you don’t need to choose a single bank. One combination that works very well is a local bank with low charges and lots of branches combined with an international bank to handle your global transfers.