There are so many reasons why the Silver Coast is a great place to buy an investment property. We’ve owned properties there now for 4 years and the demand for our holiday properties has increased massively over that time. When we first advertised there were only 11 competing properties that we could find on the web.  Now (2011) there are over 200 and we are still experiencing more demand than we can satisfy over the summer period. We have added 25 properties to our Silver Coast property portfolio from investor owners (and our own properties) in the past 2 years. To see the portfolio visit http://www.rental-retreats.co.uk/rental-properties Our own holiday apartments are by the beach in Sao Martinho Do Porto and Nazare on the Silver Coast. That’s just an hour drive away from … Read entire article »

Arranging your holiday home flexibly is really important to secure the most possible bookings for your home when you’re not in it. And it isn’t hard either. Here are a few tips: Sofa bed! Even if you’ve decided to cap the number of guests in your home you should still think about getting a sofa bed. That way when brother and sister refuse to share the same twin room your guests have the option to let them fight out the room or the lounge. There are plenty of examples we’ve seen where the guests would prefer to split out to sleep in individual rooms, such as a group of friends for example. A sofa bed doesn’t cost much and you’ll see the return. Twins and Doubles 1 bedroom house – we recommend a double … Read entire article »

Truthfully in our experience it’s a bigger job that we imagined. Taking my husband two full weeks and costing around £15,000 for everything we needed for each apartment we own. Because it’s difficult sometimes to know where to get things from (especially if your property is abroad) it’s sometimes better to collect everything at home and then ship it in one lump. We chose that route in some cases for our holiday properties in Portugal – working out more expensive overall but less running about for us.The shipping cost for 15 square metres was about £1500 door to door. Get in touch if you want us to dig out the details of the transport company we used. Even minor items such as white tea towels for us were a nightmare to get hold of, … Read entire article »