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Topic: Leisure & Travel
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Shropshire – England’s Forgotten County
by David Carter
Shropshire is England’s forgotten county but it is well worth making the effort to get there. It is only three hours by train from London and there is plenty to see and do. It is primarily a rural county steeped in history bordering as it does mid Wales from Oswestry in the northwest to Ludlow and the Hereford border in the south.
Consider staying in Shrewsbury, the capital of the county. Shrewsbury is a growing mediaeval town with a large mixture of places to stay and lots of things to see. It straddles the mighty Severn River, one of Britain’s longest rivers. The river twists and turns and revisits the town in several places. It can and does still flood some of the city and the effects of global warming have persuaded the town council to beef up the flood defences.
On a mild balmy day with the river low and sleepy it seems hard to believe that the river could ever offer a threat, but when it is angry and running, it does. Visit the castle set beside the Victorian railway station. Shrewsbury is also the home of Charles Darwin and there are reminders of their famous son throughout the town. Consider too the half timbered and ancient Rowley’s museum. To the north of the town is an area called Battle, named after the Battle of the Roses fought there in 1400 when men were slaughtered. Do visit the church just north of the battlefield site where a permanent memorial is on display.
But Shropshire has much more to offer than simply the county town. In the south Ludlow is a fascinating ancient town. Katherine of Aragon was imprisoned there in the castle after Henry the eight turned his attention elsewhere. The castle is still in surprisingly good condition and is open most days.
Bridgnorth is a town split in two. The lower level beside the River Severn and the high town, which commands views along the river. Take the old Steam powered Severn Valley railway, scene of countless films and TV series, from there south towards Kidderminster over the border in Worcestershire.
In the north of the county Ellesmere in the Shropshire Lakeland is a small town well worth a visit. Check out the canal where Thomas Telford’s masterpiece, built in 1760 runs through the town before wending its way over the border and into Wales and on to Llangollen. Oswestry in the northwest is a bustling market town and on market day you are likely to hear Welsh being spoken as often as English.
Another small town well worth a visit is Much Wenlock, located on Wenlock edge, a cliff face that runs diagonally across the county. There is an ancient monastery there and quaint buildings aplenty. In the far south of the county Ludlow is a must. Narrow streets with many half-timbered buildings always have something to offer. Check out the Feathers Hotel in Ludlow for olde England history and charm.
For the more energetic walking holidays across the moorland of the Long Mynd offers surprising taste of wilderness. Lastly, if you still have time, try and visit Telford at Ironbridge where Thomas Telford’s bridge still stands, the first metal bridge ever built anywhere and the harbinger of the industrial revolution
Shropshire is still undiscovered, especially for the international traveller, but it has much to commend it. The people are gentle and friendly and it is well worth the effort to get there. You can access thousands of holidays villas and cottages worldwide can be checked out on my website www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk. Enjoy travelling!
The southern English county of Hampshire is only two hours from London by car or on the frequent rail services. The county has much to offer regardless whether you seek cities, rural open countryside, or beaches and boat trips.
On the coast you will find the bustling fierce rival city ports of Portsmouth, fighting ships, and Southampton, merchant and cruise vessels. In Portsmouth you must visit the historic dockyard. Go on board Horatio Nelson’s flagship “Victory”, check out the “Warrior” and Henry the eighth’s “Mary Rose” which is still undergoing restoration after being raised from the seabed. Take an hour’s cruise to the Isle of Wight and see Britain’s biggest yachting extravaganza of Cowes week.
Southampton is the traditional homes of the Cunarder Queen liners. It still is, and fabulous views can be had of all the liners coming and going up Southampton water from Calshot beach in the south of the county.
To the west of Southampton is the amazing New Forest. The New Forest was established in the eleventh century by William the first as his personal hunting ground. Thousands of wild ponies, deer, cattle, donkeys, and at certain times of the year pigs can be seen all over the forest running free. Good times to visit are early May to take in and photograph the foaling season, and September, to see the roundup, known locally as the drift, when all the ponies are rounded up and branded and checked for health problems.
If you go walking in the forest, and you can do just about anywhere and it costs nothing, ensure you wear stout shoes as the Forest is a stronghold for Britain’s only poisonous snake. the adder. All the towns stock antidote these days and deaths are unheard of, but an adder bite can still inflict nasty pain. Bites are very rare, adders are small snakes that rush off into the undergrowth, but just in case you should stand on one, good shoes are a must.
Check out Lyndhurst in the centre of the forest, Burley for the witches, I kid you not, Brockenhurst for the ponies, restaurants, hotels, and main line quick rail links, and lastly Lymington for sailing and interesting shops and antiques. To the north east of the county you will find Winchester, Hampshire’s third city and the county town. This is a smaller ancient city boasting an impressive Cathedral, burial place of Jane Austen, as well as the monument to King Alfred, he of the burning the cakes fame, Wessex’s own ancient king.
Golf, sailing, riding, and fishing on the three majestic rivers Itchen, Test and Avon provide fishing on rivers as beautiful as you will find anywhere.Hampshire is unquestionably one of England’s most beautiful counties, a week would never be enough to take in all it has to offer. Why not stay for two? There is a wide variety of accommodation from small boarding houses to international standard hotels, cottages to riverside marina apartments. You can see thousands of cottages, villas and apartments worldwide on my web site www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk. Have a good holiday!And take care.
Tiger Woods today strolled to his second British Open Golf title finishing fourteen shots under par, five shots ahead of the veteran, the Scot Colin Montgomerie. It was Tiger’s tenth success in major tournaments and now only Walter Hagen’s eleven majors, and Jack Nicklaus’s total of eighteen lie ahead of him.
Earlier in the week on the Friday Jack Nicklaus had said an emotional farewell to a huge crowd of golf fanatics who applauded him and Tom Watson all the way around the famous old course at Saint Andrews on the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the headquarters of golf.
But this was Tiger Woods’ tournament and he stretched his lead overnight as all of his rivals failed to put in a strong challenge. One by one they fell by the wayside, and in truth Tiger always gave the impression that should a real challenge have materialised, he would have been able to raise his game. Nevertheless he won by five clear shots to confirm once again, as Colin Montgomerie said afterwards, that he is indeed the leading golfer of his generation, possibly any generation. It wasn’t all bad news for Colin, his second place moved him fifty-nine places up the world rankings to twenty-second.
Jose Maria Olazabal finished a creditable joint third on minus eight, sharing the third prize with a delighted Freddie Couples. As for the other challengers Retief Goosen and Vijay Singh fell away and were never able to land a blow, the same could be said for Sergio Garcia, and Kenny Perry. Ian Poulter finished the best placed Englishman in what was ultimately another poor overall showing by the UK based players.
The weather remained fine throughout the four days of competition with barely a shower of rain. Occasionally the wind blew but never gale force as it can do on this exposed Scottish east coast course. The crowds came in their droves, forty thousand more than last year, and despite the one sided victory everyone enjoyed the week. Once again the old course failed to throw up a hole in one, there hasn’t been one on this course in the Open Championship since Ben Crenshaw’s in 1984.
Before the championship began Tiger was available on the betting exchanges and in the betting tents at 3/1 against and a huge tip went round that Tiger was in the mood to do the business. Plenty of huge bets were struck and many of the professional punters went home happy to thoroughly toast Tiger throughout the evening. Just for once the bookmakers must have taken a battering.Aint that a shame!
Next year the championship returns to England, and to Hoylake for the first time since 1969. Hoylake is a seaside links too, set on the Wirral beside the Dee estuary that looks out across Hilbre Island and over to North Wales and Snowdonia beyond.
Tiger has already sent out a warning to all the others. They will have to improve considerably down on Liverpool Bay if they are to stand any chance of removing the coveted claret jug from Tiger’s iron grip.
Yes it's true, I was once a Kleeneze agent and do you know I quite enjoyed it. It was a few years ago now and I'd been made redundant. There was nothing new in that, I was just one of the zillions who found the going getting tougher under Mrs T.
After applying for fifty jobs without so much as landing a single interview, I came across an advertisement for Kleeneze agents in a local job paper. I knew of the company of course, who didn't, but I was quite surprised when I received all the bumf and a sample catalogue. Most of the stuff was pretty good too, the case, the video, it was just well, surely no one would buy black bin bags and yellow dusters from a door to door salesman?
Needs must! No sign of a job, and my savings were rapidly running down. It's funny but when you are in work and you look in your building society book and see several thousand pounds of savings you think "mmm, I'm doing alright there, a few bob behind me now!" But as soon as you lose your regular pay cheque, it's amazing how quickly those savings diminish, and how paltry they suddenly appear to be.
The nightmarish thought flashes into your mind. 'What the heck am I going to do when those savings run out?' It gives you sleepless nights, and cold sweats I can tell you. Anyway, enough of those negative thoughts, let's turn back to the K thing. My hundred catalogues duly arrived and I set about sticking my gold labels on the back. I was in a hurry you see, now I had them, I wanted them out on the streets earning their keep. An undelivered catalogue is a dead cxatalogue, so the mantra said.
The sun was shining and I left the house, accompanied by my supportive lady who assured me we were only hours away from picking up orders aplenty. I didn't dare tell her I thought it was a waste of time, but what did I know and what did I have that was any better? Nowt, that's what.
The catalogues went through the doors and three days later we called back just as they recommended. Friday teatime, pay day, the day when there's cash about and people feel better with the weekend ahead. The first thirty collected catalogues produced.....absolutely nothing.....those that we could recover that is, the ones we couldn't get back were lost forever and would have to replaced at my expense.
Then lo and behold at catalogue number 31 a dear old lady gave me an order. And guess what for? Black bin bags, I kid you not. I don't know whether she felt sorry for me or just couldn't be bothered to wander down to the shops. When I delivered the bin bags, she bought something else too. Yellow dusters! My oh my!
And the orders started to come, truly they did, a trickle at first it has to be said but no less than promised in the manuals. An egg slicer here, a wet spoon stand there, and they all add up, of course they do. If you need to earn cash, if you ever need to start over again, then there is no doubt that this agency does work, especially if you can find a locality that hasn't been touched for a long time. You might find that harder than you might think, because there is a veritable army of Kleeneze operatives out there, but if you can, you really could make some good money, especially if you can recruit one or two good recruits to work under you.
With Kleeneze being the oldest multi-level marketing company in Europe you receive a commission on all the sales that your recruits make as well as your own, and on their recruits too. If you can build up a big enough group you can build up a substantial income. There's no doubting that.
So why aren't I still doing it today? The Great British public, that's why. Anyone who has had to deal on a daily basis with the GBP will probably know what I mean. It's not all of them, of course not, but there is a minority, and it has to be said, a growing minority of PITA's knocking about. (What's a PITA?) Pain In The..., well you get the picture.
There's the PITA who glares at you as soon as you open his front gate as if you are a child molester or are about to repossess his grotty house. The PITA who is convinced you are a burglar and whose first action is to pick up a baseball bat and waggle it in your direction, the PITA who just knows you're carrying on with his wife and he'll give you what for, the PITA who thinks it's funny to set his PITA dog on you, and worst of all the PITA who smiles encouragingly and places an order just to get rid of you, and then rarely keeps the appointment when you return to deliver the goods, and when you do catch him in, at the fourth attempt, he jabs his finger through the first black bin bag and says "they're not very strong are they. I aint paying for them!"
Yes after a while dealing with the PITA's of this world, they got the better of me. I was lucky too, a good job came along and my catalogues were retired, battered, some of their friends missing in action, and who knows resting to fight another day, should the need ever arise.
So can you make money being a Kleeneze agent? Yes, the answer is a definite YES. It helps if you are reasonably fit, are thick skinned, can keep a smile on your face despite numerous knockbacks, and most of all, are determined, which of course is the one single asset that most really successful business people always possess. Determination, and lots of it. If you have that, you will certainly succeed. But if you have that quality in the first place, my guess is, you will succeed in another field. Don't let me put you off, if you need to earn money, you can, doing this, and if my world suddenly came crashing down, I would certainly consider starting all over again, smiling at PITA's and praying for an order. Best of luck in whatever you decide.
If you had asked the question a couple of weeks ago whether England could win the ashes back after twenty fruitless years you might have said an optimistic yes after the Australians made a dreadful start to their tour. Four defeats in a week must have set some kind of record for the Aussies, and I doubt if they have ever been beaten four times in a week before, and it will certainly be a very long time before that happens again.
But recently they have been back to their normal hostile selves and once again it looks like they will romp home. Certainly the bookies and the betting exchanges believe so. As I write Australia are 1/2 on, England 7/2 and the draw at 13/2. Bookmakers and Spot Traders don’t often get it wrong. As far as they are concerned it is an almost open and shut case.
Yet there are some reasons to remain optimistic if you are English. We do have bowlers in Harmison, Jones and Flintoff who can ruffle the Aussies, always assuming they remain fit, and all three have suffered through injury.
The batting too looks more solid, and to have more depth. It would be nice to see Michael Vaughan get a bagful of runs early on, and Trescothick to show he can score heavily against the old enemy and especially against Glen McGrath. Ashley Giles has certainly improved too, but it is here that the Australians remain streets ahead of anything we have to offer. Spin. Legspin is absent in England, and has been for decades.
True both Warne and McGrath are now 35 and cannot go on forever, and you do feel that if we are ever to regain the coveted mythical trophy we must dosothis time. Pieterson and Bell are useful additions to the side. Thorpe is back for what must be a last hurrah. One thing is clear. If we are to win we could do with winning some tosses, and then doing the right thing. Something we abysmally failed to do on the last tour to Oz. We need to start well, to get runs on the board, and most importantly we need to compete in every area of the field. A tall order yes, but not an impossible one, and there is a slight feeling about that Michael Vaughan is destined to wrest the trophy back from the old enemy, someday. If he did, a bet on Sports Personality of the Year might be considered.
This summer he has his chance and it will make for riveting viewing, that’s for sure.
Keith Miller died today, and rarely among my sports heroes, I felt as if I'd lost a personal friend, even though I never met him and never saw him play. The nineteen sixty Australians were the first tourists I saw, Keith's last tour was in 1956. Coming so soon after the loss of Cloughie too, the world will be a poorer place without them both.
Keith Miller was the Ian Botham or Freddie Flintoff of his day. As a kid he was sports mad and wanted to be a jockey but between sixteen and eighteen he shot up into a fine figure of a man and all thoughts of riding horses were abandoned. But he never lost his love for the turf where he was often to be seen. At Ascot or Melbourne it was all the same to Keith, with a girl on his arm, more often than not sharing a joke with his great pal Dennis Compton.
Reading the history books one particular stroke seemed to catapult him into the national consciousness. It was 1945, the war barely over, he was playing at Lords and smote W E Hollies a mighty blow that crashed onto the balcony above the English dressing room, a hit that was only just short of Albert Trott's mighty blow that cleared the Lord's Pavilion, the only person who has ever achieved that feat. Perhaps big Freddie might have a go at that one before he is done.
When Keith came off the field a reporter asked him how he coped with the pressure of standing up to fast bowlers. No helmets in those days of course. He smiled and replied, "Pressure is a Messerschmidt up your arse!Playing cricket is not!" Priceless. Keith had indeed flown Mosquitos in the war for the RAAF andon one occasion was forced to crash land in Norfolk, injuring his back in the process. It didn't seem to hinder him too much.
Keith Miller could bowl quicker bouncers than Ray Lindwall and sometimes off just four paces. At the age of 36 he came back in 1956 and was still hostile enough to take ten wickets in a test at Lords, only the second Australian to do so at that time.
Keith never captained Australia and that was surely their loss, as Richie Benaud said,he was the best captain he ever played under, and that will do for me.Keith was a true and staunch friend of this country, coming back at every opportunity, for the cricket, the racing, Wimbledon and to see his pals of which there were legions.
And now he has gone, and all we have left is those memories, and fading black and white photographs of that muscular charismatic man with flowing dark hair and all smiles as he joked with the close fielders. I have a picture in my mind of Keith and Dennis standing at the bar, drinks in hand, planning out the evening, and the play for the following day. A mischievous grin, a drink for everyone present, and the priceless gift of making everyone there feel good about themselves.
Farewell Keith Miller, mighty man of the cricket field, and so much more, the world is poorer for your passing.
Read more articles on Sport and Cricket at www.thewritingpad.co.uk
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Topic: Travel & Leisure
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Journeying Through Dorset - & The Jurassic Coast
By David Carter
The county of Dorset on England’s south coast is a county of great contrast but one that will reward the determined traveller again and again. Take a break from driving and jump the three-hour rail journey from London Waterloo to Bournemouth. Deer can often be seen as you pass through the New Forest after Southampton, so keep one eye open.
Bournemouth is a clean and prosperous seaside city with hundreds of hotels ranging from the tiniest, to large international standard establishments. The beach is long and sandy, and though it may be busy on the weekends in the summer, it is long enough to accommodate all comers.
Five miles to the east you will find the pretty ancient town of Christchurch where the Priory stands cheek by jowl with the ruined mediaeval monastery. Stroll beside the twin rivers of Avon and Stour as they head for the sheltered harbour and onward to the sea at Mudeford Quay. The Quay is well worth a visit too, if only to watch the kids of all ages pulling the crabs from the fast flowing Run as it dashes through the channel.
To the west of Bournemouth is the revitalised town of Poole, and the huge natural harbour, second in size only to Sydney. Take a boat trip to Brownsea Island and spot the rare red squirrels. Visit Sandbanks too, and millionaires row, where film stars, pop people and sportsmen and women like to take a fancy to the modern art deco homes.
From the end of the Sandbanks peninsula take the old chain link ferry to Studland Bay. There is a beautiful sandy beach here too and you can walk along the shore to the pretty village of Studland, but be aware that this is a nudist beach. And it’s used, at all times of the year, making the patrons much hardier souls than I! It’s not unknown for them to approach strangers too. Methinks they hide a weird sense of humour!
From there, head south towards Swanage. Stop off at Wareham and take a drink at the Inns on the picturesque quay. Take the Swanage road and pass the impressive ruin of Corfe Castle. Spend a while climbing the fortifications, and experience the feel of what it must have been like defending a fortress in the middle ages.
Swanage is a small typically English seaside town, almost unchanged in the last fifty years, and no less attractive for that. You can arrive there by steam train on the Swanage Railway from Wareham. Travel west of Swanage and the terrain becomes wilder. This is Purbeck country, the Purbeck Hills, Purbeck stone, and the Jurassic coast.
Towering cliffs, strange rock formations such as the Durdle Door, and Lulworth Cove are worth seeking out. This coast is known as the Jurassic coast for the vast number of dinosaur remains that have been and still are regularly discovered. The original Jurassic Park!Continue westward to Weymouth, another English seaside town. But Weymouth has much more to offer than most. The quayside that boasts working fishing vessels coming and going on every tide, the nature reserve, and the monk’s swannery at Abbotsbury. Buy fresh fish and crabs from the boats moored at the quay, take the seasonal quick ferry to Jersey and Guernsey. It’s a four hour trip but you can be there and back in a day. And don’t forget to visit the strange place that is Portland Bill to the south and west of the town. It is here in Portland harbour that the Olympic Games sailing events will take place in 2012.
Continue westward to Lyme Regis on the Devon border. It was here that Meryl Streep filmed the famous scenes from A French Lieutenant’s Woman on the Cobb, the old stone quay that curls out into the channel. Walk on it at your peril in high winds, for it is slippery, and not flat!
Time to turn inland. Beaminster and the old church, before continuing on to the county town of Dorchester. This is Thomas Hardy country, there is a statue to him at the top of the High Street. Dorchester is Casterbridge in his books, Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and there are memories of him everywhere.
Continue northward to Shaftesbury and Sherborne, home of Sir Walter Raleigh. Visit the Abbey, the castle and the antiques shops that abound in the town. In the north of the county the countryside and the people differ markedly to the costal strip. A slower pace of life, more time for everything. The land is rolling, green hills on chalk downland that is home to rare breeds of sheep. In places huge sculptures have been carved from the hillside where the thin topsoil has been removed revealing the white chalk beneath. White horses, riders on horses, and the mediaeval pornography that is the Cerne Abbas Giant. Visit Blandford Forum too, another riverside town that can trace its heritage back to Roman times, and beyond.
Take a slight detour over the border into Wiltshire and see the county capital of Salisbury and the beautiful cathedral with the tallest spire in England.
Dorset is a fine county to explore, full of quaint thatched cottages, and beautiful pubs that anyone can visit at any reasonable time. Rest your feet for an hour, you don’t need to buy alcohol if you prefer not, you’d be made just as welcome buying soft drinks and hearty crusty rolls. For the most part the food is good and fairly priced. Distances in Dorset between the towns are small and you can see a great deal in a week, but hey, two weeks would be all the better!
You will find thousands of holiday cottages, villas and apartments, worldwide on my holiday home website www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk FREE worldwide internet advertising on www.homemax.co.uk. Place your ad today see your ad today. There are more travel and leisure articles on www.thewritingpad.co.uk
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Trading The Betting Exchanges By David Carter
The numbers of people working from home utilising the talents of the Internet continues to grow at breakneck pace and one of the largest areas of growth in Britain is Online Trading, both in sports and miscellaneous markets.
There are numerous advantages of setting up and running a sports or miscellaneous trading operation from home. Firstly overheads are kept to a minimum, there is no need for expensive office accommodation or expensive staff, and there is no requirement to buy stock or any possibility of bad debts. Secondly, any and all profits are completely tax free (in Britain presently at least, though you would need to check that stat in your area.)
The markets that you can trade from home are far too numerous to mention here, but are not confined solely to sports. Political appointments and results, stock markets, even reality TV show results are avidly followed by the growing army of online traders.
So what is the difference between online trading and gambling? Simple, in gambling you back a horse or a team in the hope that it wins. In online trading you buy a bet because you believe it to be of good value, and then you can sell it to someone else for more money if you wish, thus locking in a guaranteed profit regardless of the outcome of the race or event or whatever it is. Alternatively if you believe a bet to be overvalued you can sell it first, with the idea of buying it back at less money later on to make your profit. This operation was totally impossible with a traditional bookmaker prior to the invention of betting exchanges.
So what is the difference between trading the Dow Jones closing price on the stock market, to trading the same thing on a betting exchange? In my view, absolutely nothing at all, except of course the ridiculous advantage I previously mentioned that all your profits on the betting exchanges are untaxed. Little wonder then that serious businesses and serious money have been pouring into the betting exchanges in the past few years.
They also offer a hedging vehicle to balance existing trading in more traditional markets and here too the influx of business has been heavy and sustained.
Already there are countless books and courses available supposedly to tell you and teach you how to effectively trade these exchanges. As with all business books and manuals, some are brilliant and rapidly become bibles, while others need leaving in the nearest public convenience poste haste.
All this interest in online trading has brought a huge surge in liquidity that makes it so much easier to trade. On one exchange alone during a recent cricket match in excess of forty million pounds was matched, that’s about seventy million dollars. On one game!That’s a stat that is bound to make anyone think seriously about online trading.
Incidentally you can still get a free thirty-dollar bet with Betfair.com, the London based exchange, if you enter the code 6CHE3VPWJ when prompted. Take a look too at Betdaq.com, an Irish exchange based in Dublin that is going from strength. They have a very nice website packed with interesting markets and a comprehensive help section.
Betting exchanges are gaining credence and influence all the time and with each month that passes seemingly another country legalises the entire operation, and it would seem that it is only a matter of time before the large exchanges are completely legalised and accepted worldwide. The exponential growth in this sector is sure to continue, governmental interference being the only possible obstacle to their onward worldwide popularity. Little wonder then that this is one of the largest growth sectors for new start-up businesses, a fact that is bound to attract even greater interest as it continues to grow.
If you are thinking of starting a new online business from home, and if you have a talent for maths, you could do a lot worse than check out the whole business of online trading. Best of luck.
David Carter’s latest published work is SPLAM! Successful Property Letting And Management. Splam! Contains over 240 pages of hints and tips on how to start your own property business on a limited budget, and how to successfully let residential property. You can view actual extracts of the book at http://www.splam.co.uk and order a download or hard copy at this site. He also runs a holiday cottage website where you can access over 7,000 cottages, apartments and villas worldwide at http://www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk You can contact David on any matter at supalife@aol.com
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Five Top Tips When Selling Your Home By David Carter
No I’m not going to tell you to have coffee boiling away and bread a-baking in that homely oven, and soothing music drifting through the house. House buyers are not fooled by such things, they have come to carefully inspect your home, and if there are coffee fumes floating about or soothing music in their ears it isn’t going to make a hoot of difference. But some things might, things like these:
Firstly, pets must go! And I don’t just mean on the day of the viewing, I mean period, and the longer before the viewings begin the better. Dogs smell, cats smell, almost all pets smell, and just because you as the owner don’t notice it, you can take it from me the buyer will. The agent will too, and if they are worth their money they will tell you about it. Nothing puts off eager buyers more than the rancid smell of dead dog. This is a huge turnoff. So get ’em out.
Secondly, de-clutter. You have probably heard this one a thousands times, but so many sellers don’t pay any heed to this sensible advice. Take a mantelpiece over the fireplace for example. Many sellers have the shelf weighed down with countless artefacts and ornaments of every kind, so much so that the viewer can’t see the wood for the trees. Get rid of them all, except perhaps your three best pieces and arrange them tastefully so they are shown off to their finest. The viewer can then see them and appreciate them, and indeed imagine their own fine things in that exact same space.
Three: ask a realistic price. If an identical or even better home is on the market up the road for 200,000, then why waste everyone’s time by trying to sell yours for 225,000? Yet many people do, and then harass the agent when they don’t make a quick sale. Could you sell Ford cars for 10% more than Ford does? Probably not, so why are the poor old Real Estate guys and gals expected to do precisely that? If you really want to sell your property, you have to compete, and that includes competing on price.
Fourth, sort out the yard or garden, the outside of your property. You will be amazed at how many people spend fortunes on the inside of their homes but hopelessly neglect the outside. Spend a few hundred on it if you have to, but smarten it up. Do some painting, cut the grass, buy some tubs and shrubs, make it look inviting, it will cost you so little to do, yet this outside improvement produces results time and time again. It really does. Trust me. The viewers will notice and you might well hook them. First impressions count for a heck of a lot.
Fifth and last, and this one might surprise you. Don’t be there! What? You heard me, don’t be there when the prospective buyer comes round. Why? Because the buyer can have a good mooch around accompanied by the Real Estate guys of course, but they will feel more relaxed if an over zealous owner isn’t there peering over their shoulder at every turn. The buyer will spend much longer in the property if you are not there, believe me, and they are more likely to ask the agent for more information, which is a very good sign that they are really interested.
When you go and look at property yourself, don’t you feel better if you can scout around without the owners there? Of course you do, and so does everyone else. Lock your best things away if you have any doubts about security, remove them from the house if need be, but get out of there on viewing day. Make the estate agent earn their fees, you pay them enough moolah after all, so have them earn their keep by conducting accompanied viewings themselves. And there is another reason to not be there too. What might that be? If you are in attendance, the buyer can ask you difficult questions face to face. Putting you on the spot, tricky ones too, such as, are the neighbours noisy? If they are, and you say "no", in front of a witness, and they buy the house, and the neighbours really are noisy, (it could even be the main reason for you wanting to move out!), the new buyers could have a legal case against you for misrepresentation.
But if you are honest and say "yes", the chances are that the prospective buyer will grin politely, and once outside walk away at a rate of knots, you won’t see them for dust. There are many other tricky questions the potential buyer might ask you too, but they can’t do that if you are not there. Selling a house can be a complicated business and the lawyers and agents should be handling these tricky questions, not inexperienced house sellers such as you might be. So take my advice, and get out of there on viewings day, and you will certainly improve your chances of selling your house faster.
Best of luck to you anyway in your quest to find that buyer, and remember, as my friend Michael is fond of saying, “there is a butt for every seat”, and if you act on these suggestions you will improve the chances of finding your perfect buyer, and perhaps sooner than you might think.
David Carter’s latest published work is SPLAM! Successful Property Letting And Management. Splam! Contains over 240 pages of hints and tips on how to start your own property business on a limited budget, and how to successfully let residential property. You can view actual extracts from the book at http://www.splam.co.uk and order a download or a hard copy at this site, or you can go direct to the publishers at http://www.lulu.com/dc. He also runs a holiday cottage website where you can access over 7,000 holiday cottages, apartments and villas worldwide at http://www.pebblebeachmedia.co.uk. Don’t you deserve a holiday? Well of course you do! You can contact David on any matter any time at supalife@aol.com
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