Propertastic’s first Press Release

Just a few days after the site went live, I sent out the company’s first press release.

One thing that I have noticed is that, when there is good news about developments in a property market, you get to hear about it really quickly. The companies selling property in that market are very quick to let the world know about it and the news very quickly spreads virally through the Internet.

When there is bad news about a market, it doesn’t spread so quickly. Sure, the information is released by news organizations, but it doesn’t get picked up and syndicated in the way that the positive news does.

Latvia is one market that I have a particular interest in. The programming for Propertastic! is all done in Riga and so I visit the city on a regular basis. I also have a couple of properties in Latvia myself – not in Riga, but in the number three city in the country, the coastal town of Liepaja.

Together with my ex-girlfriend, we bought a couple of small properties there in good locations – one in February 2005 for EUR13,000 and a second in March 2006 for EUR18,000.

We got our timing right getting into the city as we guessed that the boom in Riga would have to spread to other cities in the country. By late 2006, the first was worth around EUR50,000 (after spending EUR8,000 on reconstruction) and the second one was worth around EUR40,000. We were kicking ourselves at not buying more property in the city while we had the opportunity.

After seeing such incredible returns in such short a time though, I feared that the market was starting to overheat. People had been talking about a bubble in Riga for over a year. While I didn’t think that there was such a danger of prices in Liepaja tumbling, I was pretty sure that prices couldn’t keep doubling annually as they had been doing and so decided that we might be better off selling up and investing elsewhere.

This was actually the impetus that led to the creation of Propertastic! I was sure that I could find a site online where I could see information on all of the emerging property markets side-by-side so I could make an informed decision on what market would be the next to boom. It proved not to be the case though and so I had to spend weeks of Googling in order to get all of the information that I needed – the information that was to become the first draft of the Key Statistics section of the site.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, around the same time, my girlfriend became my ex-girlfriend and we stopped talking with one another for a while and the properties remained unsold and so we still own them together.

This proved to be a shame as, if we had gone ahead with my original plan of selling them at the start of 2007 we would have got out of the market just at the right time.

It was April when things started to go wrong in Latvia. Property prices were already looking over-priced as they were, but the government had to take a number of initiatives in March in order to try and cool down the economy. There was no immediate price crash – for the first few weeks everyone adopted a ‘wait and see’ attitude. By May, however, those that really needed to sell had to start reducing prices a little in order to move them. When they still didn’t move, they had to reduce them a little bit more. By the start of July, prices had already fallen by maybe 5% in total.

I always thought that information on the Internet spreads at the speed of light but, after three months of the market in Latvia (and neighbouring Estonia) going into decline, there was very little information available in English about the current state of the market. Articles about the Baltic Boom were still being circulated.

So I thought that it was time to tell the world the real truth about what was going on in the markets. The results of which you can read in the press release that I issued:

Propertastic! Downgrades Property in Baltics