The Inspection Trip! Day 1.

Friday evening we flew out to San Javier airport in Murcia and were met by Russell and Dan from Tarletan. They told us we had a drive of just over an hour and as it was dark we wouldn’t get a chance to see any of the area. So, we took advantage of the time and discussed what the plans were for the next 3 days. Dan had arranged a number of viewings for us on Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday was free for us to re-visit any areas we wanted a second look at or any areas we still wanted to see.

After an hour travelling on a very quiet motorway we arrived at our destination – Valle del Este golf resort. Now, I can understand them wanting to start the trip with a good impression – but this really is a nice place. We had a room overlooking the golf course which, both Neil & I being keen golfers, was good and bad – good as we could chill on the balcony watching the players coming up the fairway at the end of a hectic day viewing properties, bad because we were really jealous that we hadn’t got our clubs with us! But, we will be back with clubs on another trip.
We were spending Saturday looking at places in Almeria and Sunday in Murcia. So we started Saturday by meeting a local agent who took us first to view a re-sale mid-terrace house, a key ready detached villa, a re-sale detached villa and a detached house off plan and a villa on Valle del Este itself. One in a small town, a couple inland and one remote in the hills. None of them ticked enough boxes, but we were quickly identifying where we didn’t want to live. Don’t get me wrong, they were all nice places but not right for us. We both loved the villa on the golf course but it was right at the top of our budget and only 2 bedrooms when we ideally wanted 3 – plus we picked up so many golf balls from the garden that we would never have had to buy a golf ball again, but we would have worried about sitting out in the garden having a glass of wine incase of mis-hit tee-shots landing close by, a real concern. Neil loved the detached house at Azerbache and it was nice, but I didn’t have the same positive feel about it, I felt it was a bit small. The villa set way in the hills was really nice with spectacular views but you would need to use a car to get a paper or loaf of bread – too remote. So, by the end of Saturday I have to admit to feeling a little dis-appointed. Not to worry, we still had Sunday

Planning an inspection trip.

We planned to fly out to Spain for a weekend at the beginning of October and spend a few days trying to narrow down the town we would want to live in. We knew we wouldn’t want an apartment as we were planning to have a dog – more on that later. We wanted a place with plenty of outside living, after all we were moving to a part of Spain with lots of days of sunshine – we wanted to be able to enjoy it to the full.

Russell asked me for a shopping list of property types and areas we would like to visit and he planned our trip, booked our flights and arranged for the hotel – I think the only things we had to do was confirm the dates we wanted to go, give an indication of what we wanted to see and tell them what we hoped to achieve.

Our shopping list included Mojacar, Arboleas, Turre, Mazzaron, San Cayetano and a selection of duplex, villas, and town houses. Oh, that’s something you need to understand – what a duplex is, what a bungalow is etc. generally a duplex is a terrace or town house or an apartment on 2 floors, a quad is 4 houses built together, one on each corner, a bungalow is a property on one floor, but it may have others built above it, a finca is a rural property - so it is really important to understand what the various types of property are. It took us ages to identify what some of the terms meant.

It seems very odd leaving all the arrangements to someone else, I am by nature an organiser. We were to be met at the airport and taken to the hotel and we had the option of arranging our own car to use or to let Tarleton drive us around. We chose to let then do the driving, after all we didn’t know the area and it would take us a lot longer to visit the various places. Russell had assured us that we would have plenty of opportunity to have time on our own so that we wouldn’t feel pressured, which was important to us.
So, on Friday 5th October we found ourselves at East Midlands airport, case packed and a lot of expectations……

Research 3: Coastal, mountains or somewhere in between?

Most people would love to live near the coast, walking distance to the beach sounds idyllic – but – how busy would it be in the summer, would we have trouble getting anywhere for tourists? Maybe we should go into the Mountains, but would it be too remote, would we feel isolated, as new comers to an area, surely it would be better to have some neighbours and local shops in walking distance? Maybe halfway between the 2 would be the best place – we needed to get over to Spain and have a good look round. So, next stage – take the plunge and make contact with agents promoting properties for sale – but get ready, once contact is made your phone will never stop ringing.

Over the course of a few weeks during summer we made contact with several different agents, went to Overseas exhibitions and started to narrow down companies that we felt comfortable working with. There is no doubt that the overseas market is highly competitive and once you are their lists, you will get a lot of pressure to book an inspection trip and you really need to be clear on what your objectives are and be confident to stick to your plan. Fortunately, among the people we had been in contact with, we came across a company in Northampton that we had never heard of, but happened to have a decent website with properties in the area we were looking at and who seemed to take an interest in what we were looking for and who spent time discussing our reason for the move. After several conversations, many e-mails and property details we decided to take the plunge. We invited Tarleton Properties to come and meet us so that we could make a final decision whether we could work with them on this major life change.

Russell came through one evening and we had a good discussion about the area we were considering, our dilemma about how to choose where to live and what we wanted to buy, our budget and various other aspects of the move. After a couple of hours we were happy that we could work with Russell and Tarleton and started to plan our trip to Spain.

Check out the Tarleton website at www.tarletonproperty.com

Research 2: Where does it rain least?

Both Neil & I set about checking property websites with properties to sell. We needed to see how much somewhere to live would cost us and the Internet is certainly an easy way to do this. We wanted to live somewhere we could get to the coast within half an hour and wanted to be on the Mediterranean coast, somewhere not too overdeveloped and still with a very Spanish feel. Somewhere with dry weather and plenty of golf. We had previously visited the Murcia region so started looking at places there.

One thing you have to get used to is that the quality of photos on Spanish properties is really poor compared to those used in this country when selling property and it did cross my mind there was a business opportunity for a photographer over there. Some rooms were so dark; it made me wonder what the seller was trying to hide. It became obvious very early on that bedrooms in Spain are just that; there is room for a bed – just! However, with most properties having an element of outside living, the rooms sizes were not as important as here (I’m starting to sound like an Estate Agent on here, although I cannot decide what the opposite to ‘deceptively spacious’ is! The other thing I couldn’t get used to is that there are no room sizes quoted as we do – everything is measured in square meters. Now, considering that I have no spacial awareness whatsoever, it was very difficulty for me to know how big a house with 95m2 of living space actually was. I need to stand inside a room to know how big it is and whether my furniture will fit.

We booked marked a few websites that seemed to have a good variety of properties listed and over the next couple of weeks spent a considerable amount of time browsing the websites and every time we came across a property we liked the look of we would then google the town to see what we could find out about the various places. We also found ourselves looking into the towns in the northern part of the region of Almeria. There were a number of towns that we kept coming across and decided we needed to do more research into these.

Research: Where do we start? On 't'internet of course!

These days everything you need to know about everything is on the internet, isn’t it? So, all we have to do is plug in the laptop, Google ‘moving to Spain’ and hey presto, we will have an idiots guide to help us on our way. Well, whilst that may seem an unrealistic expectation in reality it does give some good links to start browsing, such as properties for sale, ex-pats sites and sites giving advice on all aspects of relocating to Spain. Did this give us the guidance we were looking for? Not as such, but it did make us realise that there were a lot of questions we needed to answer about what we were looking for from our move to Spain so that we weren’t jumping from one idea to another and reaching a point where we were so confused we didn’t really know what we were trying to achieve.

So, our first task was to make a list of criteria our move to Spain needed to fulfil and here it is:
* Good golf (probably top of the list but not exactly a challenge in Spain)
* Warm dry weather (again, not too big a challenge for Spain)
* Somewhere typically Spanish (now this shouldn’t be too big a challenge)
* Within 30 minutes drive of the coast

Not exactly a massive list of requirements, so this should be relatively easy.

Narrowing down the area seemed a good place to start.