A Place In The Sun Exhibition - Manchester - 1st weekend in March
"This was the first APITS Exhibition in Manchester and it was as popular and busy as you would expect.
The interesting thing was that the traditional markets seemed to be surprisingly popular - Spain and the USA in particular, although there was also a lot of interest in France and Italy.
Most people seemed to have cottoned on to the fact that Spain and USA are now buyers' markets and that there are some great bargains to be had. This coupled with the fact that there is still a wish for people to buy there meant that the traditional markets were showing lots of interest this weekend.
Certainly the majority of people that I spoke to who were buying in these countries were thinking long term and mainly for personal use. The figures may be slightly distorted by the fact that this was the first A Place In The Sun exhibition in Manchester so we will see what happens over the next few exhibitions. The increased interest in Spain actually caught us out and we ran out of brochures by the end of Saturday!
Obviously the investors were still mainly looking at the emerging markets.
The other thing that was obvious was that more agents and developers are trying to differentiate themselves from the cowboys by doing things properly (owning the land, planning permission, recommending independent lawyers etc) and we have therefore seen many of them approaching us to carry out due diligence checks on their properties before they start selling.
I also spoke to quite a few people who had bought a couple of years ago in various places and were now finding problems (properties not built, money disappearing etc). As ever, the common theme with these people was that they had not done their research or used an independent lawyer. One woman I spoke to was £150,000 down on a deal and the person that she gave the money to has disappeared with her cash. When I asked her why she didn't use a lawyer she said it was because he seemed trustworthy at the time! I wish I had that sort of money to risk..."
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