Foreign Perspectives

If you’re looking to buy a home a fair distance from where you live, chances are you’ll try to make your search part of a small holiday and that you’ll be aiming to go there when the weather is good too.

Whilst I appreciate the sentiment in trying to make it more of a holiday than a chore, remember that if you’re planning on settling in that area that you won’t be constantly going to the local theme parks or tourist attractions but instead will be going to more mundane places like the office, the shopping centre and the schools. This doesn’t mean that it needs to be a boring time for you but that you need to consider the amenities that you’ll be using on a regular basis if you buy in the area.

Also, it is at least partly a chore. Who really wants to go round an area just to find out where the schools and shops are? Can you face the hassle of looking through bus timetables just to see if you’ll be able to use public transport to get to work?

Finally, that weather business. Whilst obviously it’s preferable not to be trawling round houses in the driving rain, you should try to go to the area when it’s “normal”. For example, if you’re buying somewhere near Disney World the area will obviously have quite a different feel to it outside the school holiday season than when it’s teeming with children. Some areas can virtually close down in the Winter and you’d not necessarily be aware of that if you’ve only ever been there in the Summer.

Buying a house isn’t just your ordinary purchase, it’s about buying a place that will become your home.

People often overlook that in the rush to buy a place to live and end up with a house that’s not really suitable for their needs or one which is in an area that doesn’t have the amenities that they need. For example, if you have kids, it’s important to consider the schools in your chosen area and think about how your children will get to the school that they’d be going to.

For that matter, will the school even accept them? You can be very unlucky if your house is at the wrong side of the road in some areas as that can mean a different school district. As regular readers will know, we didn’t follow our own advice here and instead of being able to go to the school 1 mile away as we had assumed, junior has to go to a school over 20 miles in the other direction which is down to our house being at the wrong side of the road!

These complications make real estate one of the most complicated purchases that you’ll make and therefore it’s best to do as much research on an area as you can before you start narrowing it down to looking at specific properties.

If you’re looking at specific areas eg Atlanta Homes for Sale or Charleston Real Estate, think carefully about the search parameters that you are using. Don’t think that you can squeeze into a place with fewer bedrooms than you’d planned because you probably can’t and likewise think about adding another bathroom to your requirements if your children are approaching their teens.

Likewise, watch how you specify the area. Zipcodes are great things to narrow the search but they can change when you cross the street so try those for neighbouring areas too. Sometimes you can find fantastic bargains that way eg move outside the Beverley Hills zipcodes (90210, 90211 and 90212) and you’ll find that the prices drop dramatically whilst the quality of area remains high.

Wendy’s about to make a start on Mums Finance after finding out that there’s money in tham thar hills, especially if you’re writing a finance related blog.

I imagine that it’ll be a day or two before she gets going in that we don’t even have the software loaded nor the database set up as yet. She’s busy picking out a new template for it at the moment though.

Sometimes I think we’re getting a bit carried away with the blogs but then we look at the money flowing in from them.

I’m sure that it’s an incredibly misleading statistic but I’m dead chuffed to read that I’ve had over 11,000 readers via Reuters in the last week alone.

Still, it’s a very encouraging statistic and indeed the number of readers of the blog as recorded by the stats on this site are showing a nice upward trend with almost triple the number of subscribers as it had in the Summer. The international readership is also well up with articles being taken by places as varied as FoxNews and the Palm Beach Post.

All of which I was blissfully unaware of ’til I started getting a rapidly rising number of click-throughs from Reuters over the last few days.

If this keeps up I may have to see about getting a job as a “real” journalist!

Googles long awaited pagerank review started working its way through the sites over the last few weeks but still doesn’t appear to have settled down.

It’s quite a confusing picture going by a number of sites that I keep an eye on. A friends key site for instance has dropped from PR5 down to PR3 for no good reason and is particularly worrying for me as he does far, far more SEO than I ever bother with. My thinking is that if it can happen to him, then it’s sure to happen to me sooner or later.

Wendy’s site has gone from PR2 to PR2 to PR0. Again, no good reason comes to mind. In fact, she’s been upping the ante with the SEO over the last few months so it should have gone to PR3.

This site is, for the moment, steady at PR4. I’ve not done any SEO on it over the last few months but was sort-of hoping for PR5 in that there’s a lot more content on it now than there was.

Meanwhile, our Whole Earth Guide has gone from PR0 to PR2 on a site which doesn’t, yet, have a whole lot of content.

Actually, as I read that, the one common factor in drops is that SEO has been done on the sites. Could it be that Google have somehow managed to negate all that SEO and look instead through to real value in the sites? Although, that would beg the question: is this blog of “real value”?