Head For The Sea


What’s a property investor to do? Tales of a banking crisis in one country or another, falling stock markets and general doom and gloom predictions. Well, you could do worse than head for the sea. Not to drown your sorrows in some misplaced suicide bid, but to invest in property by the waterfront...

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A New Dawn


Today, we wake up to a new President-elect of the United States of America. Thank goodness. At last, Americans can travel the world and not feel embarrassed to open their mouths, lest someone hears their accent and vilifies them for it (I met an American couple at Heathrow Airport once, who were pretending they were Canadian, just to avoid abuse)....

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Slash Those Rates!


There’s only one way to curb the current worldwide economic crisis, and that’s by dealing with the problem that started the whole thing in the first place...

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The investor mindset


Now that the dust (or most of it) has apparently settled following the almost cataclysmic worldwide banking meltdown, the question many property investors are asking themselves is: ‘where is now the best place to buy?’

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Short term memory


It’s a fact that people have short memories. I mean, after the shocking bombing of the London Underground in 2005 (was it really three years ago?) it seemed that no one was ever going to use the Tube again. Everyone went out and bought bicycles. But how short-lived all those healthy intentions were. The London Underground is now as packed (and miserably sweaty) as it always was...

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Could China be next?


It is an undisputed fact that China’s economy has been booming beyond recognition. Unprecedented growth rates and out of this world building construction (Shanghai wouldn’t look out of place in any science-fiction movie) have led to a country which is unrecognisable from twenty years ago – well, the cities anyway. All of which has stunned the world.

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Banking Blues


Blimey, what a few days it’s been. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry of a financial expert has been jumping on the bandwagon using the word ‘crisis’ to describe the current banking chaos enveloping the United States and beyond. And they’re not wrong. The astonishing collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank (the fourth largest in the US) and the even more astonishing bail out of insurance giant AIG has left financial analysts and institutions rooted in the headlights of pure panic, horror, and disbelief.

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Cyprus is flying high


Skydiving is a cool (if somewhat mad) activity, and I’m told that the island of Cyprus is now a trendy place to do it. It basically entails jumping out of an aircraft at about 10,000 feet, enjoying the exhilaration of freefall, before opening your parachute for a (hopefully) soft landing.

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The Terror of Television


Companies in general (and property companies in particular) are often scared of Television. No, not scared – terrified. It’s because they’ve all seen those undercover TV programmes where secretly recorded dodgy sales people promise clients the Earth in exchange for their hard-earned cash, with unrealistic claims over property appreciation etc...

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The Seven Deadly Sins


I was watching a property programme the other night, and pondering the fate of a couple who were complaining that the villa they’d bought in the Valencia region of Spain had turned out to be illegal.

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