The Dunes Golf and Spa Resort itself comprises of studios, one, two and three bed apartments in a low rise setting in a prime residential area close to all facilities including a 36-hole golf course, exclusive marina and many fantastic restaurants, offering all types of cuisine.

The Dunes Golf & Spa resort is directly located next to glorious white sandy beaches that stretches as far as the eye can see. The resort offers on-site world class Thallasso Spa facilities including an indoor swimming pool, Turkish baths, a sauna, gymnasium and beauty & massage treatment rooms with discounts for residents. One can enjoy a massage on the exclusive private beach set aside for residents only or play a round of golf at the finest African golf courses located on your doorstep.

• 100m from an exclusive private beach for residents only with sunbeds and umbrellas
• On-site 1st class Spa facilities with 20% discount for residents
• Two outdoor pools with lounge facilities (one adult and one children’s pool)
• Indoor pool in the Spa Centre
• Optional Platinum service for seniors offering full services including airport transfers and welcome packages
• Private beach

The Dunes Golf and Spa Resort, Sousse, Tunisia

Forget kerb appeal and think carbon appeal. In the current housing climate if you want to get ahead of The Jones and their new spa bathroom, designer kitchen and the latest in-house surround sound entertainment system and you can add £3,350 extra value onto the price of your home simply by making your home energy efficient.

New research from the Energy Saving Trust reveals 53% of all householders would be willing to pay extra for homes with greener features so invest in an energy efficient home and you could greener in more than ways than one.

Half of UK home owners believe homes with greener features will be easier to sell in the current market. It seems however they also believe that estate agents don’t put enough value on a homes ‘green’ credentials, with many feeling that they lack the knowledge and skills to highlight the benefits of a property’s energy efficiency performance. Two thirds of home owners questioned would like clearer information as to the likely running costs of a home during the sales process, a clear indication that eco property is starting to become mainstream terminology in today’s housing market.

Two-thirds agreed that in light of the current economic climate, of rising gas prices, water and electricity prices home-buyers are more likely to consider the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) to ensure a home has lower-running costs above other factors. A ‘poor’ EPC could in fact result in you losing money as a potential buyer may haggle down the extra cost against having to improve the home’s efficiency in the future.

Commenting on the research, Nubricks resident international property expert, Chintan Mahida, said, ” I’m in no doubt this research will have an impact not only on UK property sales but also foreign property sales. Emerging property markets such as Brazil, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt are already beginning to implement ‘green’ features into new resorts setting them ahead of established holiday home countries such as Spain and Italy who are already facing tough times. Having a green overseas property should set you apart from other sellers especially as rising fuel costs are resulting in a larger carbon footprint.”

According to the World Trade Organization, Cape Verde is going to be the 153rd country to become a member of the organization. The World Trade Organization says the nation, made up of nine islands west of Africa, has accepted the commitments to become a member and having met its entry requirements, Cape Verde set to become part of the organization in late July.

” This is yet another feather in Cape Verde’s cap and further adds to the islands investment credentials. The WTO’s accession process can take up to five years and by successfully meeting the WTO’s entry requirements, the Cape Verde government has demonstrated its ability to bring its trade and economic policies up to standard, ” commented Nubricks.com overseas property blog editor, Chintan Mahida.

“Cape Verde WTO membership bodes well not only for the country but for investors in Cape Verde’s property market,” Miss Mahida added.

The most recent countries to become members of the World Trade Organization were Ukraine, Vietnam, Tonga and Cambodia. All countries with strong emerging property markets.

Leading property investment company, Obelisk International, is proud to launch Obelisk Interiors, a new furniture & interior design company based in Spain.

Obelisk understands the challenges of property ownership abroad, and as such, has launched Obelisk Interiors to bring distinction and style to overseas property.

The interior design and furniture company undertakes all aspects of furnishings and décor. By providing decoration and furnishing solutions clients benefit from a cost effective local service, without the anxiety of sourcing individual pieces of fixtures, fittings and furniture.

Steve Hampson, Operations Director of the Obelisk Group comments, “We have listened very carefully to our clients, many of whom have highlighted difficulties in finding quality design and furnishing services. As a successful, well-established business, Obelisk decided to meet this need by expanding into this area.”

The company deals directly with suppliers from all over the world and are therefore able to put together furniture packages at highly competitive prices.

Supplying furniture packages starting at only €4,999, for a low cost Starter Package right through to the prestigious Platinum Package, includes everything an investor or lifestyle property owner needs for their property.

With property markets becoming more and more competitive the slightest thing can be off putting for potential purchasers – be it the wrong colour walls, an uncomfortable sofa, or even the bed facing the wrong way. Just by changing the look and feel, freshening up an apartment with new clean lines, furnishings and décor can really make a difference.

This is why Obelisk Interiors also provides a complete Makeover service to ensure those first impressions last. The company’s design team is on hand to advise clients on how to make the most of their space by introducing clean lines, quality furnishings and chic decorating solutions.

Steve adds, “We have all seen the makeover programmes where the property is a complete mess and within a couple of days, or even 60 minutes, it is totally transformed into a clean, liveable or even sellable environment.”

Obelisk Interiors can help to get a property ready to sell or rent by advising on how to create an inviting area. This is one of Obelisk Interiors key advantage points – to get the client that all important sale or even long-term rental contract, just by making the property stand out from the crowd.

For the more discerning client, Obelisk Interiors have a unique tailor made service based entirely on meeting the exact requirements of the client, whether it is a conservative, traditional or contemporary look. If a particular piece of furniture cannot be easily sourced, Obelisk Interiors will personally commission specialist craftsmen to make the piece to the exact specifications – ensuring all requests are met. This gives the client the freedom to demand a completely individual service, over and above the norm.

Steve Hampson concludes, “All services will initially cover the Costa del Sol from Gibraltar to Nerja. Our goal is to expand our services to various other destinations throughout Europe.”

The team at Obelisk Interiors will be happy to answer any questions or queries you may have about the services offered.

For more information on Obelisk Interiors, contact Obelisk free on:
0808 160 0670 (UK) or 1800 932 514 (IRE)
Email info@obeliskinteriors.eu or visit our website: http://www.obeliskinteriors.eu

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House Prices in Europe

Throughout Europe all is not well either, the real estate markets of the Baltic holy trinity of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia dipped despite remaining fairly strong as the top five property performers over the past year. Spain experienced its lowest house price increase in nine years, thanks to purchases mainly dependent on variable- rate mortgages, making the market vulnerable to interest rate changes. Other European countries that have experienced lower house price increases than in 2006 were Sweden, Finland, Italy and Switzerland with Israel sitting a the bottom of the table with a year-on-year 6% fall in prices.

Asian Real Estate Prices

However, other than in Thailand, where house prices dipped slightly due to political uncertainties, the Asia-Pacific region is booming, with Singapore leading the charge, reporting the biggest climb after its 8-year property slump, average house prices up by a quarter in the period compared with a 6% gain in 2006. House price inflation also picked up strongly in Japan, the country’s 15-year downturn definitely over, with prices in its ‘Big 6’ cities up by 7.75%. The steady flow of money home from overseas Filipinos has fuelled the market in the Philippines, with prices up by 14.29%. Hong Kong and Australia also showed strong gains, despite higher-than-average interest rates, with market price rises of 8.78% and 9.54% respectively.

Finally Africa, whose contribution to the global real estate landscape at present may be small, it too is enjoying house price inflation with South Africa reporting 15.36% year on year growth to second quarter in 2007.

The international real estate outlook here in the Western Hemisphere may appear to be bleak, elsewhere the picture is much rosier for our Eastern counterparts.

The new design may be a bit of a shock to some of you at first but I’m sure that you will get used to it, we’ve tried to create a clean and contemporary looking design that offers an upgrade not only in looks but also improved usability. All of our previous content is hopefully easier to navigate to from the now alphabetised sidebar categories menu.

Over the coming weeks, I am sure that there will no doubt be a few little bits and bobs that may need tweaking and we hope to continue this process by adding more functional elements into the site. A big thank you goes to Jayme and Tony for all their effort in making our new online presence come to life.

The market for overseas property is officially global as individuals are investing in a host of different property types in almost every continent. Nubricks.com now offers market information and new property developments in over 42 destinations such as Costa Rica, Morocco and Abu Dhabi. Over 8000 unique users visit us each month looking for updated information on emerging markets and newly launched development opportunities. The first into the property podcasting arena, our first series of the Nubricks Overseas Property Podcasts have been very popular with over 13,000 downloads since August 2006, with listeners downloading on average 3 different podcasts.

If you want to comment on our new design then why not have your say by clicking on the ‘comments’ link at the top of this blog post or the leave a reply box at the bottom of this post and tell us what you think.

Take a look a some excerpts from the article below:

We’ve all heard the hype: podcasting can help your business reach new potential customers. But are such claims justified? And who’s actually doing it?

Many of the news and broadcast media are now taking advantage of the technology.

And so are several businesses. Not just the obvious branding businesses either; ordinary companies performing tasks unassociated with IT or communications are getting into the new medium. Adam Samuel is managing director of real estate marketing company Nubricks.com. “We started blogging, which is essentially the written version of a podcast, last year,” he says. “It was successful and got the information we wanted to a new type of audience. Podcasting was an extension to the blog, whereby you’re using an audio format – it gives an additional stickiness factor to our website so people come back for the whole series, and it offers a flexible format so the business traveller can listen in at their leisure.”……..

……..The company really found it that straightforward. Other benefits were evident before long. The scope for advertisers was considerable. “It’s effectively an uncluttered space – you have people’s full attention. So if someone puts an advertiser message at the end it gets heard,” says Samuel.

Our overseas property podcasts feature interviews with a range of industry professionals who give an insight into their specialist market place and offers tips and advice on purchasing a property abroad in a variety of locations. If you would like to listen to some of our overseas property podcasts click here or visit the ‘Podcast’ category on the right hand side.

Rightmove states that:

“More than half of all UK estate agents advertise their properties on Rightmove.co.uk displaying properties worth over £146 billion. Eight of the top ten corporate estate agents (those with 100 or more branches) currently list their properties on the site.

Rightmove attracts over 17 million visits from active home movers every month, who view over 346 million page views per month. We have successfully positioned ourselves as the UK’s number one property website, offering our members exposure to the largest home moving audience in the UK.

Not only is Rightmove an established property portal, it is positioned as the 10th largest website in the UK ahead of well known brands such as Friends Reunited, Lastminute.com and Easyjet.com, showing that the British public has well and truly embraced the concept of using the Internet as a research tool.”

It’s published statistics for May 2006 are as follows:

Page Views: 346,159,423
Total Visitors: 17,009,903
Searches: 31.5 million
Registered Users: 2.1 Million
No of Properties: 817,387

That is an impressive list of figures, but with all that market share and volume of visitors, why has Rightmove’s property search technology remained unchanged?

Do Rightmove know something we don’t or they adopted the mentality of “if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it!”. Having watched the site develop since its inception, it was interesting when the site after a recent redesign, changed back to a similar design adopted in its earlier days, a fairly clunky but simple design. Is this decision a reflection of their target user base?

Last month we reported on new online tools which can help you to find out the selling price for property based on Land Registry record data, useful when buying an investment property or just your own home. Rightmove beware, as now a whole new wave of Web 2.0 UK property sites are springing up everywhere, which are making searching for property even easier. Take Extate.com who have just released the second version of their site. It’s new features include:

Expanding UK coverage
Save properties to your shortlist and share/collaborate with others
RSS feeds for your refined search
More details: price per sq ft, lease expiry, etc

Nestoria.co.uk only covers London at present, but their tagline states “London today, the rest of the UK soon”.

Nestoria have a great search tool, using tags and area list in alphabetical order and my favourite, a mapping tool using a Google mashup. As you go through and filter your results the map changes accordingly, so it is not too cluttered. It also includes the proximity to the nearest tubes, shops, schools, pubs, photos, health and census.

Rightmove without a doubt have the market share and very deep pockets, however with social networking now a hot topic, will the rise of web 2.0 property sites take the place of those old clunky database-driven property websites?

Online house hunting
In the US and UK today, around 80% of house hunters now use the Web to kick-start their search for a property, as demonstrated in our post about Realestate.com. In fact, according to traffic statistics expert Hitwise, around 1% of ALL internet traffic in the UK is property-related. Home hunters executing property searches on portals and contacting property agents account for the majority of this traffic and particularly so in the field of overseas property investments where distance makes online search the first port of call for many overseas buyers. Altogether, the top five UK property portals entertain 16+ million user sessions per month. These figures serve to show how enormously popular online property searching has become. As online house hunters and new sources of property information continues to grow: How do overseas property website owners in particular, market themselves online effectively?

With coverage of overseas property in both off-line and online media, on an upward trend, finding avenues to get YOUR international property offerings heard and mentioned above the crowd of real estate paraphernalia out there is getting harder and more important than ever. Unless you can:
a) count yourself among one of the big boys in the online property world
b) are friends with a very nice property journalist or
c) have a lottery grant style budget to buy the services of people who are friends with lots of nice property journalists
your property marketing options come down to trying to make friends with the said nice property journalists which could take some time or attempting to stage a PR event worthy of a mention on a shoestring budget.

Doing it for yourself with Property4Media
Now, I strongly subscribe to the ‘ I can make it at home’ theory, so if you write well and have a weekly slot of 30 minutes to spare, Property4Media may well be your shortcut to media-mention heaven.  Aimed at property industry members only, Property4Media is the home of press releases about all things property-related, including overseas property, home improvements, gardens, interiors, residential & commercial property, construction, mortgages and more. Subscription to the website is free to all property writers in TV, radio, broadsheet and internet media’s and is attracting wide interest from freelance journalists (currently 1600 signed up), not to mention those with regular mainstream property columns.

Forming part of the UK-based News4Media brand operating online news portals for the UK media via Finance4Media, Entertainment4Media and newbie Property4Media. Also affiliated to the brand, are TravMedia and Food4Media already established in the UK for some time. TravMedia was founded by CEO Nick Wayland in Australia in 2000, and along with Food4Media is now the leading free news-wire style service distributing breaking travel and food news, operating in multiple regions of the world, including the USA, the Far East and Australia. Over 200 NZ travel and tourism companies supplying releases, it is the ideal tool to for journalists to keep their finger on the pulse of breaking news stories via just one email.

Property4Media hopes to replicate this success here by offering UK property journalists with a single organized resource to filter the constant stream of property news. Property companies and organizations have a clear way to deliver relevant breaking news directly to media that needs industry information. Subscribers to the service have the following tools at their disposal:
E-mail Alerts – breaking property news emailed to journalists and can specify delivery timing and a preferred area of industry focus ensuring your PR release reaches the right person.
Journalist Alerts – A handy tool for property companies searching for relevant media coverage. Journalist pursuing a particular angle, submit a specific info request e.g. Dubai property, new golf developments, up and coming events such as the World Cup 2010 South Africa, London Olympics 2012. You get to respond to info requests relevant to your property product and keep track of changing property trends.
News Room – The latest news from real estate organizations worldwide.
Press Centre – All archived releases uploaded by property developers and real estate agents, searchable by topic, and company name for full contact details.

Property4Media are also planning a series of free London based networking events, which as we have mentioned before can be a goldmine of contacts with PR’s and journalists in attendance. At least 4 events are planned throughout the year, with the first in September 2006.

TravMedia and Food4Media have had great success and now charge approx a £250 annual membership fee and £80 for each media release though bulk discounts do apply. Property4Media are offering FREE membership to property companies for 3 Months before going commercial. Register for the service online at http://www.property4media.com/ or email Craig Sinclair here.

Property4Media is a direct route to property journalists, making it an ideal, cost-effective, do it yourself PR tool. Here at Nubricks.com, we have recently signed up for the service and look forward to seeing a flurry of press mentions in the very near future! Like Nubricks.com, Property4Media is yet another non traditional route to build PR for your property company, why not give it a go and try your hand at a spot of home-made PR property buzz.