Mallorca or Italy?
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.
Our financial advisor mentioned to us that there were businesses that provided tailor-made property search services for people who didn’t want to go through the whole time-consuming estate agency process. Being a bit picky and short on the attention span front, this kind of service had instant appeal. He recommended Shortcuts and we homed in on their service.
We discussed our thinking in terms of what we wanted, how we would use it and where we might want to be located at length with Jan at Shortcuts, both over the phone & via email. The first thing she did was to help us make our decision regarding Italy versus Mallorca before formulating the Property brief. We chose Mallorca for several very practical and emotional reasons. We also loved a particular village called Deia where we had holidayed often.
In creating the brief Jan wanted to know about our lifestyle and tastes – we even sent photos of our house in the UK to get a feel for what might appeal to us in Mallorca. We like our privacy and we enjoy good food, so Jan recommended excellent accommodation and restaurants for our stay as well.
We visited the island twice and spent three days in total looking at five properties before putting in an offer on one, which was accepted. We will need to do some work to mould it into the holiday home we want, but it has tremendous potential in the village we adore and is close to some of the finest eating in the Mediterranean. Shortcuts helped clarify our thinking and undertook all the legwork we had no time for, enabling us to turn a dream into something more concrete in a fraction of the time. We took an important shortcut that has reaped many dividends.
