Our First Customer Feedback

The first press release spread throughout the Web quickly and the site received its first few visitors. One of them, as we had requested, was kind enough to contact me with some feedback.

Here’s what he wrote:

Budget flights to Belgrade and Podgorica

Hi,

On your key statistics page, you have said there are no budget flights to either Serbia (Belgrade) or Montenegro (Budva or Podgorica)

I would say that Jatlondon.com has some pretty reasonable flights (eg under £100 return) to Belgrade & Podgorica.

ThompsonFly have very reasonable flights to Dubrovnik in Croatia which is only an hour's car journey from Budva. (I paid £64 for a return flight at the end of May booked 5 days beforehand.)

Best regards


Davie

I was so excited at getting feedback from a real live visitor for the first time, just three days after the site had gone live, that I got back to him immediately:

Hi Davie,

Congratulations! I just wanted to let you know that you are our first real visitor to the site who has taken the trouble to drop me a line.

The site only went live in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning and so we're still ironing the bugs out at the moment.

I feel like I should send you a medal or a bottle of champagne or something, but we've spent our entire budget on Latvian codemonkeys to build the thing!

So at this moment, all I can offer is my sincere thanks for being the first of hopefully many visitors to the site.

How did you find us, by the way?

As for your comments about the flights, yes you're right that the cheapest way to get to Montenegro is via Dubrovnik. We mention this in the Buyer's Guide to Montenegro section.

The problem with compiling the 'Key International Property Statistics' is that there are many cases where there is no definite 'yes' or 'no' answer, but that it should really say 'depends'. But I wanted to avoid adding pages and pages of footnotes to the information there as it's complicated enough already!

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us. I think I'm going to head off and frame your email now!

Have a nice weekend.

Kind regards,


Nick

Davie was kind enough to indulge my craving for information and got back to me later that evening:

Hi Nick,

I feel privileged to be your first visitor. Thanks.

I found your site whilst looking for news about Montenegro in Google news.

I have a property in Montenegro that I bought for investment purposes and I tend to watch fairly closely how Montenegro's boom is being regularly reported (especially recently in UK newspapers)

As well as Monte, I keep an eye on the property markets & what's happening in Serbia and Albania - Now there's a high risk/possibly ?! high reward market for you - I guess you'll add this country to your guide at some point.

As to your site ... well I think its nicely laid out. I like the idea of a seperate area for businesses to add their links if they wish and the directory is a great idea. It would be an idea to add some contacts to some of these directories to get things started. (I've added a link to the Bar Association for Monte under Lawyers) The quick guide is fine and the guides are an OK starting place.

Some (hopefully) constructive criticism - perhaps you should think about going into more detail in your country guides (such as the Red Guides and some other magazines attempt - though they do charge a helfy price for pretty obvious info) You could add more info as to where in each country are the (possible) hotspots and interesting possibilities off the beaten track (eg skiing resorts in Monte/Lake Skadar etc) - not just the capital cities - and not just off-plan properties - I never go for these having heard so many horror stories about developers not delivering. For example, having visited Poland recently, some tertiary towns such as Gliwice, Nowy Sacz and Lublin and some of the smaller mountain towns (eg Zywiec, Wisla) are experiencing greater gains than the likes of Krakow, Warsaw and Wroclaw. The guides could also include a little more info about the actual countries and the people.

I must say that nothing beats actually visiting these countries and meeting local agents and foreign property investors and it's obviously difficult to try to give a lot of info i n a couple of pages.

In addition to Albania, have you considered including Moldova & Ukraine ?

Anyway, best of luck.

Best regards

Davie

I do like to write and, if someone takes the time and trouble to give me their thoughts then I am more than willing to reply with my own:

Hi Davie,

Thanks for coming back to me so quickly and with such a detailed response.

At the early stage of the site's development, feedback like this is like gold dust as it's easy to get into a 'can't see the wood for the trees' situation after living with the thing for six months.

Albania - did you read this piece plus the comments on it?:

http://ourmanintirana.blogspot.com/2007/07/only-way-is-up.html

The plan is definitely to fill in the gaps when it comes to countries such as Albania, Moldova, Bosnia and Macedonia. We needed to make a start somewhere though and to cover 16 is taking enough resource as we've got at the moment.

Thanks for the link to the Montenegrin lawyers. There was supposed to be more entries for the directory before the launch than there are, but the guy who was filling it in for us quit a couple of weeks ago and so didn't get to finish it in time.

You're right that more detail would be useful. This is certainly in the plan - we're just at that 'journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step' stage at the moment.

The techies are still at the end of my 'need to have' list at the moment before they can start on my 'would like to have' list - these are the things that we hope will take it from a good site to a great site.

As it says in the About Us section of the site, the idea for it came about because I had bought together with my girlfriend a couple of cheap apartments in Latvia which doubled in price in 18 months. I feared that the market was over-heating and so was looking to get hold of some data where I could see all of the statistics of all of the other Eastern European countries side-by-side. After hours and hours of Googling, I was still none the wiser. The information is all out there on the web, but it took a massive amount of time to assemble it all together. I noticed that other sites covering these subjects 'cop out' if information is difficult to get hold of and just talk in generalities rather than real numbers.

I noticed that not many of the other property sites are using 'Web 2.0' concepts in terms of attempting to form a community of users who are contributing their collective wisdom to inform one another. One of my favourite sites these days is tripadvisor.com and I wanted to apply the same concepts that they do.

No single person is ever going to have enough knowledge about all of these markets to cover all of the possibilities for investing in 16 different countries. As we all know, two properties just half a mile from one another can have totally different levels of potential, so a site like ours is only ever going to be a very broad starting point. But after inputting all the data and seeing the stories that it told, together with the latest news from each of the countries, I could see which countries had the most potential - and this is not something I was able to get from any other site I visited.

The next phase is to get local 'stringers' in each of the market translating content from the local equivalents of the FT because there's a lot of information from the local markets that never gets translated into English. The Latvian press has been saying that the market here has been on its way down for three months now, but very little of this has filtered onto the web yet. Good news spreads fast on the web because there are sales agents all trying to hype their developments, but they're going to keep quiet when the news is not so rosy.

Before that though, I'm planning on producing podcasts for each of the countries - basically phone interviews with agents in each country. Of course they'll all be trying to sell their territories hard, but I'll be asking them tricky questions so it's more than just more PR-puffery.

And then the plan is to go out and visit the markets with a video camera and shoot some content, like a grittier version of A Place in the Sun?

Before we do all that though, we need to get a few advertisers onboard to fund all my megalomaniacal dreams!

From what I understand, Moldova is in a similar situation to Albania, though I believe that it is slightly more screwed up than Albania and doesn't have any nice coastline either.

I was in Kiev last summer for the first time and couldn’t believe how much development there's been already - it was like being in Dubai. The prices and the rents there looked totally insane to me. I think that Western Europeans should stay well away from it - the Russians have been buying up the country for a long time already and so they're the ones who've already made the easy money from the country.

As you may have noticed, we're also in the process of finishing the Russian version of the site. As they're the other big buyers in Eastern Europe (as you're obviously aware from being in Montenegro) they deserve their own version of the site.

Anyway, I'm sure that I've rambled on enough already, but thanks again for the advice and for listening to me.

Have a very pleasant weekend.

Kind regards,


Nick

So, as you can see, I am always interested in receiving feedback from visitors – whether by email to nick@propertastic.com or as comments on what I am writing here. And you can be sure that you’ll get a detailed reply (well, unless I start getting swamped, that is!)