It seems incredible that it is a year since my last post, but I have been very busy finishing off one property in Nardò and restoring another in Monopoli as well as developing a new project in Galatina and keeping up to date with developments in the Puglia property market.

Demand for property here continues to increase and prices have risen in the more popular areas. On the positive side there is now a wider choice of already restored properties, but bargains are harder to find (which isn’t to say there aren’t any). New estate agents have sprung up, dealing almost exclusively with foreign buyers and there is a tendency to take the ‘ a property is worth whatever someone will pay for it’ approach and some imaginative pricing as well as a certain disregard for hard facts as far as planning and building regulations are concerned.

More than ever there is a need for impartial advice and support for people looking to buy in Puglia, which is what I set up to offer 12 years ago when I started my Puglian property journey. Increasingly though, I have been unable to help as many people as I would have liked to simply because of time constraints and because I have been looking after clients from their first searches until the completion of their restoration and, often, beyond.

With this in mind I plan to take on, and train, more staff but also limit what I do. In the future we will help people find the right property, accompany them on viewings, do the necessary due diligence and offer support throughout the buying process, before handing them over to an English speaking ‘tecnico’ (geometra, engineer or architect) who can get quotes and project manage any work on their property. In the Salento area we have also found an excellent building company with a fluent English speaker on their management team and I will continue to look for similar resources.

Last year I launched an investment project to buy and restore a fractional ownership property Villa Carezza.. At an early stage in the proceedings one of the investors asked if they could buy the property for their own sole use (and for holiday rentals) and this is the property I have been restoring in Monopoli. It is now called Villa Colombo and the main house and annexe are almost finished. I will post an article about the restoration process and before and after pictures over the next month.

At a Place in the Sun show last May I found that there was a lot of interest in the fractional property concept and, once Villa Carezza was sold to its new owners, I set about searching for a suitable new property. It has taken a while, with some stumbles along the way, but have now found the perfect property in Galatina – Palazzo Lillo, which I will also write about shortly.

I will be running some free webinars over the next couple of months and will also be back at A Place in the Sun from the 2nd-4th of June. Enter your email address above to follow this blog and future developments (we don’t use your email address for anything else) and do get in touch if you need any help with your Puglia property quest.