So you have bought your Off Plan Property and started on the road to ownership.

As many are aware the “buying an Off Plan Property” model allows most buyers the flexibility of paying in instalments. So lets use an example below:

Mr Investment buys an apartment on the Costa de la Luz in Spain on the 1st January 2004.

The price is 100.000€ (what a bargain) and the property will be complete on 1st January 2006.

This example does not include 7% IVA tax and other associated costs. The developer’s terms are as follows:

3000€ reservation deposit
10% 30 days after signing the contract minus reservation deposit
10% payment date 1st July 2004
10% payment date 1st January 2005
10% payment date 1st July 2005
60% on completion

So the investment would have cost in pounds sterling:

The 3000€ will cost £2109.6 @ rate 0.7032
The 7000€ will cost £4922.4 @ rate 0.7032
In July 2004: £ 6652@ rate 0.6652
In Jan 2005: £ 7065@ rate 0.7065
In July 2005: £ 6824@ rate 0.6629
Final Payment: £ 40944 @ rate 0.6824

Inter-bank rates taken from Daily FX are approximates and you would not receive these when using a foreign currency exchange company.

So the total investment would have cost: £ 69517 The reality is that if you buy your currency through a foreign currency exchange company you will pay 2-4% over the inter-bank rate and that is where they make there money.

I have been introduced to a company whose claim’s had me interested.
1) Guaranteed to be the best rates available.
2) Exchange your currency at the inter-bank rate
3) Cut out the middle man
4) Savings that go straight to you
So with these claims I tried the service out and these are my findings. I paid £200 to become a member and that was it. (I made this back on the transaction)

Excellent web interface and easy to use.
See the rate change in real time and the rates are very close to inter-bank rate.
Customer Support is good but could be excellent.
Once I had picked my rate I made a BACS payment and received the payment in full (charge and commission free).

Overall I was very impressed, if you don’t want to pay the £200 then you can still trade and still get a better rate than foreign currency providers.

They even have a service where by you can buy currency for travel at 0% commission. I felt very comfortable working with them, but I can give you all the information and you can check it out for yourself.

So if you are interested in either buying currency for holiday home payments or just travelling abroad go to my contact page here and ask me for more information!

For those of you who missed the infamous ” A Place in the Sun” episode, which put the Cape Verde Islands firmly on the International Property map, there is another chance to see it tonight on More4 at 19:00pm this evening. Enjoy…

Flicking through the threads in my rssreader today, I found a post at Matt Cutts Blog (Google Engineer) regarding BMW. Now as many of you know Google is the Search Engine to aim for when looking for volume of traffic. However the days are gone when it was easy to rank in the top ten and using a few questionable techniques would almost guarantee you a top spot. These techniques are known as Black Hat and there are still many companies and individuals who practice these. Google has been cracking down on “Black Hat” and the following case has the largest media coverage so far:

Matt found the BMW site was violating Google’s Webmaster quality guidelines; specifically the following “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.” As such they have now been kicked out to the index and will have to do a re inclusion request once they have cleaned the site up and find out who created the doorway pages!

So what was the issue?

As he explains in his Blog, search engine ‘bots’ arriving at the following www.bmw.de/bmw-neuwagen.html would see a page full of keyword-loaded text, which had been optimised to ensure a high search engine ranking. But what the googlebot saw and what was shown to the visitors were two quite different pages, as a piece of JavaScript would immediately redirect visitors to a completely different website. (See Blog for illustrations).

Keyword-optimised ‘fake’ pages created purely to attract search engine robots are known as ‘doorway’ or ‘gateway’ pages and have long been employed by many seedy industries to boost the rankings.

Are you at risk of being dumped by Google?

So you have taken the route of SEOing your site or have employed a company/individual to do it for you. Here are some points to note below: 

Costs can vary immensely, so do your homework of the going rates.
Make sure you don’t have duplicate content on your site, this can dampen your rankings or if it is really bad get you delisted!

Don’t use any of the following techniques:

Cloaking, redirection, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, anchor text stuffing, hidden text, spamming link directories or Blogs to name a few. 

If you have employed someone, check the work; ask to see what he or she has done for their money! 

It is a long road these days and there are many pitfalls along the way, so don’t get sucked into all this GUARANTEED rankings rubbish it simply isn’t true IMHO.

If you stick to the Google guidelines you will rank well in Yahoo and MSN too (in my experience) it just may take a long time, so be patient.Contact me if you feel you are being duped and I will try and point you in the right direction.