On a Postcard

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Not so long ago that answer was “no” but not any longer.

These days you can advertise your property using adwords (expensive) or make use of one of a number of free property listings sites such as Great Property Direct.

Do the free sites work? It’s early days for them so it’s difficult to say how effective they will prove to be but already some sales have gone through them and each one will have saved the owners thousands in commission to the estate agent so it certainly seems worth spending 15 minutes to create an advert.

Popularity: 8% [?]

One of the peculiar effects of the decline in the value of the dollar in recent times is that we’ve been getting increasing numbers of Americans and Canadians staying with us.

When we first thought about it we figured that with the dollar dropping, we’d not get any more Americans but what has happened is that those that are coming (and their numbers are definitely down) are booking not through the hotel reservation systems that they would normally use but rather through hostel booking sites. They’re doing that on the basis that “obviously” the hostels will be cheaper although that’s not really the case these days: true hostels certainly should be cheaper but the hostel sites list even five star hotels these days.

Quite why that effect isn’t applying to the UK guests I don’t know.

Popularity: 7% [?]