Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Looking to buy or sell a property in South Africa?

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I just finished watching the latest episodes of Survivor and Lost and looking at all of that lovely scenery has me dreaming of exotic locals.

Do you ever think about living in another country or perhaps having a second home in another country? I know that several of my readers work from home and make their income from their websites, as I do. All we need is a good internet connection and we could work anywhere right?

Here I am talking about how nice it would be to move to an exotic location and I’m forgetting that some of you live in places that I’d love to travel to and perhaps move to!

If any of you happen to live in South Africa or if you’ve thought of purchasing a home there you should take a look at the Property Home website where you can view South Africa Property Listings. You’ll find property listings by real estate agents, private sellers, property developers and property landlords.

Not only will you find South Africa Houses for Sale, but you’ll also find properties to rent or “to let”.

One feature of the site that I really like is that once a real estate agent or property owner has registered one of their properties on the site they can then go and search for a prospective renter or buyer.

PropertyHome has a database of close to 50,000 prospective home buyers. Their system is set up in such a way that real estate owners can quickly and easily search for suitable buyers for their properties. In fact, within seconds of listing your property for rent or for sale you’ll be automatically provided with a list of prospective tenants and buyers whom closely match your property listing.

This sounds like a great way to market a property! I really don’t think that we have anything quite like this in Canada … not on this scale anyway. I think it’s great. If I were seriously looking for a home in South Africa I think I’d be happy to register and list what type of property I was looking for and then be contacted by both private sellers and real estate agents. It would save me time going through all the listings on several sites!

I also like the fact that if I were selling a home I could put up a listing, perhaps one that said “Real Estate Home for Sale by Owner” and immediately get a list of prospective buyers for that property. It sounds win win to me.

The very best feature is their special introductory offer. Property Home is offering all advertisers the opportunity to list their properties for free for a total of three months. I know that it’s not possible to sell or rent all properties within three months, but I think a high percentage are sold within that time period and if a seller or renter were able to find a new owner or tenant in that time it wouldn’t cost them anything at all for the listing!

At this point I have no idea if Chris and I will ever move out of the country or purchase a second property elsewhere but it’s good to know what’s out there isn’t it? Hopefully this information about Property Home might come in for a few of my readers.





Our neighbors are trying to sell their house in January – Good Luck!

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Well our neighbors home is up for sale again! They must really want to move. Who puts their house up for sale in January the coldest month of the year here in Toronto?

Once they took their for sale sign down and said they were getting some repairs done on the house (changing from oil to gas heating, new furnace and who knows what else) I didn’t really expect to see a for sale sign go up before March or April.

I think in Northern climates most people who are thinking of selling their homes try to put it up for sale in the early Spring. I’ve never sold a home, but that’s certainly the time of year that I went looking to buy a house.

In my personal experience that’s a good time to look for a new home. The snow is melting or melted so you can see the whole house – foundation and all. I mean, you want to be able to see if there are any problems right? Sure you can get an inspection done, but everything’s easier when you can actually visualize the whole house and structure. The yards also look better too which makes the houses more appealing.

Also, when I went searching for a home to buy I saw probably close to 50 homes. The majority had leaky basements. How do I know? Well it rains quite a bit in the spring and a lot of the houses literally had puddles of water in the basement. Some had several inches of water. In fact, I think this house was the only one with a dry basement. I knew right away that the foundation was probably in great shape! That’s something that you wouldn’t be able to tell very easily when buying a house in the dead of winter!

As far as I’m concerned they might as well have a sign on their lawn saying Tennessee land for sale for all the good putting their house up for sale now will do them. I wish them luck, I really do … but their house still needs a lot of work. They haven’t modernized it at all. Perhaps they are thinking a desperate home buyer will come along.

Our neighbors can’t sell their house!

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Our neighbors who were trying to sell their home since late September finally took their house off the market. No one was interested in buying it.

We heard from one of the home owners that they had trouble selling because they have oil heating and their tank is very old and new owners won’t be able to get home insurance because of it … or something to that effect. So they’ve taken their home off the market until spring.

In the meantime they are replacing their oil heating with gas. They actually had the gas heating installed on Monday. Surprisingly it wasn’t all that noisy! Lucky for me.

We have oil heating as well and I guess we’ll either have to replace our tank in the near future or switch to gas heating. When we first bought our house I’d planned on switching to gas. I knew our oil tank was almost empty when we bought the house … unfortunately I didn’t know that the old owners were obligated to sell the home with a full oil tank and the tank was filled up the day we got the house I think! That kind of derailed my plans to switch over to gas since emptying the tank is supposed to be a pain.

Did you know that when we first bought this house the house beside us became vacant just a few months later? The former home owner had cancer and she passed away. At that time we considered buying our neighbors house as a second home that we could rent out for a few years and then eventually renovate both semi-detached homes to make them one home.

I guess now that I know what bad shape our neighbors home is in it’s a good thing we didn’t buy it five years ago!

I just hope that when they do sell their house that we get good quiet neighbors!

PureCosta has information about Costa Rica Real Estate and Living in Costa Rica

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I’ve always had a list of places that I’d like to visit at least once in my life. Some places I’d even consider moving to if I enjoyed the area or country enough.

One of the places that I’d like to visit and would consider moving to is Costa Rica. I’ve been drawn to the country because if it’s wildlife.

If you’re interested in learning more about Costa Rica and perhaps interested in investing in property there you should visit the purecosta.com website.

The website is owned by Coldwell Banker. They are very passionate about Costa Rica – particularly the Southern Nicoya Peninsula. Their agents are licensed in both the USA and Costa Rica and they have a lot of experience in helping anyone who is interested in Costa Rica.

You can learn quite a bit about Costa Rica on the site. They have information about the country, the economy, what it’s like to live there, the people, the climate, currency, cost of living and taxes as well as information about investing in Costa Rica.

At this time there are 13 pages of property listings in the Listings section of the site. All I can say is you must take a look at the listings. The properties are beautiful! If you have any interest in purchasing a property in Costa Rica the listings page will make you seriously consider making an investment. Check it out.

Furnished Apartments for Rent in Dubai

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I’ve known a number of nurses and doctors over the last decade who’ve traveled abroad to work for a few months to a couple of years in foreign locations. I think I know about five nurses that have worked in Dubai.

Obviously people who in other professionals also take temporary work – engineers, contractors and so on.

If you will be traveling to Dubai for vacation or for a short stay, possibly due to work, you might want to look into staying in one of the lovely dubai hotel apartments or dubai villas that are being rented at dubaiapartments.biz.

The apartments are furnished and dubaiapartments.biz only accepts rentals that are up to their high standards. What does this mean? Well it means that all of their rentals are the equivalent of 3 star ratings or higher.

In fact, dubaiapartments.biz is the largest online short term rental portal in Dubai. There are over 120 self catering properties, listed by the owners themselves or property managers. The easy to use site is a great way for those with properties to rent to connect with tourists or those who are in Dubai for short term work who need a comfortable place to stay with all of the amenities.

If you’d prefer to stay in on of the luxurious dubai hotels you’ll find them listed on the site as well.

The site is very easy to use. Simple visit the site and right there on the main page you can begin your search for a furnished apartment by location. You can also use a variety of search features to make sure that the list of properties in your search result are really what you are looking for by listing how many bedrooms, price range and of course your rental start date.

Photos accompany many of the listings so you’ll be able to see your future accommodation before you book your stay.

At the bottom of the page you’ll see links that will take you to pages that describe the various locations that the various furnished apartments are located in. This might make it easier to decide which location you’d like to rent within.

Visit the dubaiapartments.biz to learn more about the furnished apartment rentals.

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