Paul and Jean Thomas both have busy working lives and with two teenage children, very little time free to search for a second property. After holidaying in Spain for many years, they had narrowed down the location to San Carles de la Rapita in Tarragona, but then needed to find the property. That was when they contacted Shortcuts to help them find the perfect apartment to suit them all as the task was far too time consuming to carry out from the UK.

John Hind from Shortcuts Property Search sent a range of interesting properties that closely matched their brief, from which Paul and Jean selected a shortlist for viewing. When it came to the actual trip however, Jean was not able to make the visit due to her son’s impending A level exams! Thankfully John had really done a good job when taking the brief and managed to grasp exactly what the clients were looking for so in just two days’ of viewing (with Paul’s mother standing in for Jean) a price was negotiated and a contract signed.

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My wife and I are based in the Middle East and very much wanted a second home in Barcelona, specifically the lovely central areas of El Born or Gracia.

My role as executive director of an investment company involves a great deal of travelling all over the world, and my wife runs her own health and beauty business. We also have two children so our time is always very much at a premium and we simply could not afford much time away to find our Spanish property. I had done some searching on the internet but trying to get hold of estate agents or information at a time that was convenient to me was proving both frustrating and time consuming. And how can you know from a website whether agents are thorough and will leave no stone unturned in order to find your dream property and work within such a limited time frame, outside regular office hours if necessary?

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We knew that the cost of property in Mallorca was relatively high, having visited the island many times - it’s just so easy to get to - and toyed with the idea of owning a holiday home. We have friends who moved over to Mallorca and we gained from their experience. But whilst we were frequent visitors to Mallorca, our business commitments in the UK remained very high and our spare time was needed for rest and relaxation.

We embarked on the occasional visit to estate agents when on the island as you do and surfed the Internet to get a feel for prices and types of properties. We had some friends who had recently bought a holiday home in Italy, which we also love, so we were still in the throes of deciding between Mallorca and Italy.

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We had enjoyed many holidays on Mallorca and were in the process of making the decision to move from England to a better climate, where we could lead more of an outdoor life in a relaxed environment. We enjoy walking, gardening and have a mad Labrador called Paddy, who we wanted to bring with us.

We were introduced to Shortcuts through a friend who thought they could help us with our decision and offer information regarding island life, practicalities and where we should consider locating. We did not speak Spanish and were apprehensive about buying a house in a different country when we’d never done anything like this before.

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We had owned a villa on Menorca some years ago but it is very quiet out of season and with three teenage daughters, we decided that Mallorca might have more to offer the whole family all year round.

Having had a villa, we also wanted a holiday home with very low maintenance and so were looking for a large apartment. We had visited Mallorca many years ago, but we were not terribly familiar with the island and an estate agent friend in Menorca recommended Shortcuts.

We visited the Shortcuts web site and then contacted them. We talked through our particular needs with Andy who turned this into our Property Search Brief and as we had already booked a week’s holiday in Mallorca, we arranged to meet him on our arrival before finally deciding to go ahead.

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John was about to retire. He had spent most of his career working for a major multinational food manufacturer around the world with six foreign postings in twenty years out of the UK. Where we should go after he bowed out of Tokyo was a problem that had dominated our conversations for several years.

With grown up children living in Canada and Japan respectively, we had no real reason to return to the UK. Working in Africa, Asia and North America had meant that we had not spent much time exploring Europe so we decided there was one last foreign location in us. We also wanted to retire to somewhere with a comfortable climate, coupled with excellent transport links to the rest of the region. Mallorca seemed to fit the bill perfectly and we liked islands.

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Mallorca had been our regular family holiday destination for years. We particularly enjoyed an east coast resort and we usually rented a villa as we often holidayed there with friends and their children.

The growth of ‘no frills’ scheduled flights from Liverpool airport were increasingly making Mallorca a very affordable weekend destination and as we had often talked about having a holiday home, we thought why not buy one in the sun? So we started looking around. Naturally our first thought was to look at villas where we had previously stayed as we knew the place well and felt at home there.

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