All the latest news from Valencia Property

Over the last few weeks we have been working hard in the background which is what we do each summer while we are "On Holiday" at Valencia Property. We have put together a book, a full buying guide for getting your own Valencia Property, we have added pages and updated over 100 posts on this blog in the background while addressing issues such as links that no longer worked and more. And the latest thing we have done is to provide you with a checklist for your Valencia Relocation, a step by step guide to what you need to do and the timelines for doing it. So today we thought we would introduce it.

The first week of the summer holidays is over so of course I recorded a podcast and wrote and published a book. Yes, despite the fact that we are officially on holiday at Valencia Property, we agreed three sales last week, have been working on another over the weekend and we have just had the excellent news that a valuation on a property that we had found for one of our clients was 20% above the price they are paying for it. There's another reason to be on our insider list because it didn't even get onto the website.

We got an email on Friday morning... "Can I visit this property today?" In virtually every case that we get this mail the answer is probably "No", because that's not how things work here. Arranging visits takes time and preparation with the selling agent, the owners, timetables (as we are usually booked up well in advance) and more. However, asking that question on the 15th August, a holiday in Valencia and Spain, then you can reliably surmise that the answer will be "there is not a snowball's chance in hell of getting in to see that property today". Apart from that you have to bear in mind one thing that's quite important... we are actually closed. August isn't for visiting houses as we have mentioned before on the blog but it can be the perfect time for preparing for the Autumn rush.

If you are not a great lover of our political posts then look away now (I'm looking at you Mr Furgason*) However, if you like a bit of extremely thinly-veiled sarcasm then read on. Today I just want to do a short post of appreciation for the great leader of the Good Old US of A Donald J. Trump. Yes Donnie, I'm talking to you today. And no, this isn't going to be about your sexual predelictions, your destruction of the American political system, your inability to form a coherent sentence (The only thing you weave is your remaining few locks into the wig) or even about my favourite nickname for you the Orange Sh*tgibbon. This is simply a post thanking you Donald for helping us towards yet another record year. Yes Donnie, we are thanking you.

One of the things we love about working in the Valencia Property market is that our job is never the same from one day to the next. We get a wide variety of clients from all over the World looking at a wide range of prices and a vast array of different styles of property. This means that every day is different as we have discussed on the podcast which you can hear here. The thing that drew me towards writing about this was when I looked at the homepage the other day and the properties we had there and then compared that to a UK based site as I am currently helping my dad to sell his property in the UK and to search for another one. Sometimes you can get absolutely sick and tired of looking at bricks and there is nothing else apart from bricks and mortar in the UK market. How can you write something interesting about something that has few redeeming features? I guess thtis is why property descriptions in the UK are so bland and vanilla.

Last week we announced our new project "Stepping Stone Rentals". The interest from both owners of properties and tenants has been off the scale since. We have already identified or been given a lot of properties to be used for the project and we already have people wanting to start their three month rentals as soon as the 1st of July! (We need to get a move on) We have also had a lot of interest from people wanting to buy a property to include in the project. So today we are going to look at the process of buying your Stepping Stone Rentals property and then we will look at getting it ready for medium term tenants which is useful for those of you already with a property.

At the back end of October last year we wrote about the rental crisis in Valencia and what it meant for buyers, tenants and us as a business moving forward. Last week on the podcast we updated you on what has been happening since and today here we are going into a bit more details on that and connecting that to the progress we are making in the background of the new Stepping Stone Rentals website and project in order to help alleviate some of those problems. Firstly though, just to let you know one thing, Valencia Property continues to be hugely busy while at the same time starting up a new business, website and finding new employees from scratch. We have just had a week with the most property enquiries seen for about six months. And we haven't had a huge slowdown in the intervening period either, it's just that in December demand was off the scale

Unfortunately in the last week we have had to say goodbye to a couple of clients, allowing them to continue their Valencia Property journey without our assistance. There are a litany of reasons why and in today's post we will go into why you may sabotage your own purchase even if you really want the property. Bear in mind that these clients may have made one, various, many or even all of the following faux pas in the last few weeks before we decided to cut them loose. You may even want to play a game of guessing how many of the following mistakes one particular client made before we decided to stop working with them.

Once again on arriving at the half way point of the year we are on target for a record number of sales this year with a large throughput of clients and also so many in the pipeline that summer is looking difficult holiday wise. However, recently we have been getting a load of calls along the lines of... "We are buying a property through another agent but we could do with some advice" "We have already bought a place but have just found your blog and we need some help" So today here is the Valencia Propery network which we put in place for our own clients.

As an add-on to last week's post about our network people have been asking what our day looks like as estate agents in Valencia. What do we actually do all day. Now a couple of months ago I put up a little video short showing a bit of this, you can see it below, but today I thought it was time to show a bit of background of what we do on a daily basis to make sure we give the best possible service of any estate agency in Spain or potentially the World. I actually wrote an article like this in 2011 on this blog but I thought an update was due because things have changed.

Sometimes we get a bit blase about living in Valencia. We talk about the year round enviable climate, the ease of living, its compactness meaning it has the advantages of big city living but the feel of a much smaller metropolis and the fact that Valencia, once the hidden jewel of the Mediterranean, has now been found by the international press and is most definitely on the circuit for lifestyle bloggers and digital nomads. Voted recently as the best place to live in the World, twice, Valencia has a lot to offer you in terms of lifestyle and value for money whether that money is in Dollars, Pounds, Euros or even Czech Crowns.

The numbers of American clients that pass through our virtual doors at Valencia Property continues to grow. Year on year and quarter by quarter we continue to see greater numbers of Americans looking to buy real estate in Valencia either to settle here or to have a holiday home leading up to retirement when they intend to settle permanently. We are often asked why this is and we constantly see posts online asking those who have already made the move whether it was worth it. The answers are almost 100% positive by those who have moved. So today on the blog we thought we would look at why Americans specifically are attracted to Valencia and, by extension, Spain.

Let's not make any bones about it but townhouses are an enigma. Here at Valencia Property we love them. They offer loads of space, great locations, plenty of potential and community (Being in a town and surrounded by others) and they are usually great value when you look at the price per square metre. However, they often require a lot of modernisation, and the bigger they are the more that modernisation will cost, they need more upkeep than an apartment and they usually don't have the kerb appeal as what lies behind that townhouse door is often very well disguised.

What if I told you that you can maybe have it all? What if I told you that something else is possible? That you could live in or near a great city without feeling overwhelmed where people still put their own family and leisure time first and you don't have to stay in the office to impress the boss on pain of losing your job and your health insurance. What if I just talked to you about living in Spain and more precisely, living in Valencia? And finally what if I told you that everyone can have it? I'd be talking total rubbish of course. A simple move to live in another place is not going to perform miracles for anyone, never mind everyone. However, another life is possible and Valencia is one of those places where your work life balance just may become much more manageable.

In other countries when you say you live in the suburbs there is an immediate impression of a sense of something very different from city life. In the UK it's all to do with middle class aspiration and keeping up with the Joneses, curtain twitching, needing the car for everything but most especially for getting to the golf club and an impending sense of quiet boredom and doom stretching from mid life into your dotage. In the USA it's white picket fences, needing the car for everything but needing to travel much further, overbearing home owners associations, every house identical and a longing to return to main street USA where everything was to hand before the 'Burbs existed. In Spain the suburbs are different because the concept of the commute was alien to Spanish life until quite recently and most of them weren't built by a developer to a template.

When you are looking to buy a property in Valencia at the cheaper end of the market you might find that your choice is a bit restricted as prices have risen considerably in the last few years. We have talked in the past in these pages about how it's difficult to find anything with basic requirements in the city for under 150k and maybe even 180k, especially if it's relatively central. It has now become even more difficult because of a new law that came out in July of which we are just starting to see the results. If you are not aware of what a VPO property is then you need to read on.

We have been getting so many requests for medium and long term rentals lately that we thought it was time to tell you more about the options you have to work with us at Valencia Property and even Stepping Stone Rentals when you are looking to rent in and around Valencia. Some people on social media platforms thought we didn't offer rentals, we do but not on the main site. Every day there are more enquiries for rentals both for long and medium term and we are hearing more and more stories of online scams so we thought we would be clear here about what we do for you with our rental service and other rental options.

One of the most important things you have to understand about society in Spain is the role of the cafe and bar in making society function. Cafe Society in Spain cuts across social,cultural and racial boundaries as everyone takes time out during the day to have their morning coffee, often accompanied by a huge mid morning bocadillo, pinchos or tapa, and then an afternoon pick me up coffee is usual too. Whether you go into the best coffee house in the town or the lowest greasy spoon cafe you will notice one thing above all others, the coffee will still be better than in Starbucks and probably less than half the price.