Hello, in continuation of last week's topic about vacation properties I went to some of my very close friends from ERA Plovdiv - Joro and Rumi and there we had a nice discussion about the benefits, pros and cons of real estate - vacation properties and Rumi, who happens to have a vacation property shared her concerns and her worries about owning such a property. The more interesting thing that happened is that she actually has a property but she doesn't rent it out, she uses it for her own needs, but she had a friend who rented it out and she was very disappointed with the property itself because the common areas looked terrible and so that gave me the idea of today's series and once again telling you why the heck common area maintenance is super important, super super important and it's going to get more and more important.
As you know our actually main business for some time has been condominium management and I do a lot of that and I have a lot of experience, we manage a lot of buildings in the city and a lot of the time I explain to people that actually a property starts to cost more and the price goes up when the building is maintained. Now, imagine you buy a property - the elevator doesn't work, the common area walls are black, hit by furniture, the railing is gone. And you're like, "oh no, I don't use it, I'm not going to pay maintenance." It's not like that, when you become the owner of a property whether it's an investment property, for your own use, sitting empty, it doesn't matter you have a responsibility to it and everyone else in the building has a responsibility to it. I'll give you a very simple example - my son-in-law, as I told you last week, has bought such a holiday property and it turns out that the building in which the property was bought we maintain it. And he knows his security knows, his cleaning knows, he's given it there to a girl who's looking for tenants, his property is growing in value, his property is not losing out on the fact that the neighbouring properties have totally run down, well he's gaining value, he's full he's bringing him income. So it is with residential property. I suppose you don't really enjoy coming home to the prefabs and and you go up, the lift is 62 with some shingles, it rattles and you know the granny on the second floor says "ah granny I don't use the lift where am I going to pay, there £3 for it."
Maintenance of common parts or so-called facilities and property management in Germany accounts for 15% of GDP. People there have a culture of this sort of thing. I see that in Plovdiv and here more and more people come and look for this kind of service, look for it yourself. The price of a real estate does not only increase or maintain if you have made improvements inside it. I really like someone went, poured £100,000 on furnishings, made it super shiny super top inside, however to get to it you go through 20 tenants, 40 junkies, broken doors or I don't know what else. Well how do you want to have high value on this property. Someone wants to give say 300 - 400 thousand bucks, my naturally he's going to want his whole environment to be like 300 - 400 thousand bucks. A property is luxurious when not only the property itself is luxurious but when the surroundings are luxurious. That's why in Monte Carlo when you go all the properties are expensive, because there everything is luxurious, everything is done, everything is maintained, everything is in some decent appearance.
So look for your maintenance on the common areas. Not even us, there are enough colleagues in the market or arrange it yourself. I have a friend Dancho. Dancho lives in the block of St. Petersburg, the high one if you remember in Plovdiv before the overpass Rodopi - 115 apartments, 115 apartments and Dancho shouts "hey there we have a house manager - Hitler, straight cars and rages and the whole entrance is iron, neat, no defaulters and everything is top." No need for a company like ours if you don't want to pay the extra expense, maybe one of you or the co-op is willing to deal, but maintain your common areas, they raise the price of the property tremendously and much more than any improvements you are trying to do inside.
That's why now the most expensive properties are in gated complexes, there you have a garden, a park, a parking lot, you have somewhere to let your child go, you have a separate environment that you are happy to go and come home in the evening and you don't think about it, than to go home and wonder if the downstairs neighbor let her fry onions for onion stew and smell everything up to the seventh floor and everybody find out what she ate.
In this regard, Dafito, the chairman of the NCRI Plovdiv, and I, and other colleagues will do an event that will be related to condominium management, of course, when all the lockdowns fall and when we have the opportunity to gather, we will promote it, we will publish it, welcome, it will be super interesting, we will have a video, it will be uploaded online. I think it's a service that's yet to develop, like I said a lot of people have seen it in the west, they're going to be looking for it here and more and more it's going to be offered and they're going to be looking for quality of that service, not like my friend Rumi her friend - she can't get to her holiday property and then why she's not making money out of it - erm , that's about it.
