It has to be said that I am not a fan of August in Italy. The beaches are too crowded, well everything is too crowded really, and one eats worse, even at favorite restaurants because the staff are run off their feet and exhausted. The worst thing for me is that nobody does any work, and everything grinds to a halt – which I find frustrating.

We had made a lot of progress with our Palazzo Viva project and our grant application was almost ready to go in after lots of delays caused by applications opening some 6 months later than promised, and all the rules changing in the meantime. We were pushing to get all the loose ends tied up when our accountant’s wife was rushed into hospital in mid-July. As he needed to do the final stages of our application, and we didn’t want to put pressure on at a difficult time, we had to resign ourselves to waiting for autumn, as his office is closed in August in any case. Meanwhile, our option on the Palazzo needed to be extended and the owners started trying to renegotiate the deal. Oh Joy!

I am pleased to report that, August notwithstanding, we have managed to get the vendors back on track and have been having good chats with investors – our first contracts are in the process of being drawn up and then, finally, it will be full steam ahead! It has been a long haul, but our enthusiasm remains undimmed, and we can’t wait to get started!

In the meantime, I have much less to do than normal as I didn’t take on new clients in the expectation that we would be starting restoration on the Palazzo sooner.

One of the things I am doing is running courses both on buying property in Puglia and on restoring property. I am also running a series of free seminars on both topics.  See here.

Places are limited though, as I want to keep groups small to give people the chance to ask questions. The first one is later this week, and I expect to do around 4 in total. I am also doing a lot of one-to-one consultations – looking over people’s potential purchases, getting quotes for work, doing due diligence before the purchase, and helping resolve any problems.

I am open to doing project management on the restoration of any properties in Nardò or Galatina and helping people find and buy good investment properties to rent out when you are not using them. I have been asked for years if I can manage rental properties, and although I did this for a long time, years ago, the answer has usually been a resounding no! I have done this briefly for some past clients but only to help in the short term (and because, historically, I was bad at saying no!).

This is all changing because, with our A Palazzo in Puglia project, we will need overspill accommodation for the Palazzo and it makes sense to also manage holiday rentals as we will already have cleaning and reception staff, laundry contracts and an all singing all dancing booking system. I will also be doing lots of PR for the Palazzo, which property owners can benefit from. We are not averse to managing existing properties providing they are of a sufficiently high standard but what I would really like to do is help people find the right properties to buy and restore and be involved from the beginning of the process.

I have trawled through all the properties on the market at the moment and have put together a selection of potentially good buys in Nardò and Galatina – see here.  If you do not already follow this blog sign up above to receive an email every time new content is published.