Girasol Homes Christmas Letter 2009

Dear friends,

Just a quick note and “round robin” to wish you all a wonderful Christmas and all our best wishes for 2010.

I don’t think anyone needs me to remind them it has been a tough year. We have seen some major and cherished high street brands in financial difficulty and have lost some of the worlds greatest icons such as Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett.

The media branded credit crunch has continued to bite with job losses being the main impact this year more than 2008 where the impact on banks, developers, many scandals, the Euro currency rates, government policy and investments were the hot stories.

But 2009 has also been a great year for companies and people prepared to innovate and work hard.

We have launched our newest site and our back office agent suite (the “lite version”) has been well received and is also free to our partners, many of our partners are now taking advantage of the full version where over 10,000 live overseas properties will be available in January and a whole host of client and property management features will be available. This enables even the smallest and lowest funded agents to compete with much larger competitors and benefit their clients and business as well.

Sadly we lost a few of our partners this year where a combination of a really tough sales environment and also the inability to respond to the market forces cost them dearly and closed their doors.

Our area of influence got larger this year with new markets in Florida, a comprehensive selection in the Algarve became available, new and bright properties were sought and found across Turkey and we added to the great start we made in 2008 in the Silver Coast area too.

Other new and exciting areas also now include Egypt, Mallorca, Menorca, Canary Islands, Marbella, Valencia Province (and City) and a wonderful selection of properties right across Spain. We are always looking closely at our partnerships and as always this is a dynamic environment where we are always looking at the service quality.

So at Girasol we have tried to adapt our offerings, our approach and tools to reflect the challenges and environment and this work we have done in 2009 has made us a much stronger and more effective company.

Looking ahead to 2010 I feel there are still going to be challenges ahead for us all, but it is an exciting one as well because we know what worked in 2008 and 2009 and this has made us into one of the larger companies into our sector.

For your reference our offices will be open until 1pm on 23rd December and re open on the 28th December, we will be checking emails and responding to them over the festive period.

Once again whether you are a client or a partner we would like to thank you for your help in 2009 and wish you a wonderful 2010.

Best wishes

Nigel Salmon and all of us at Girasol Homes

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