But about five years ago, on visiting yet another of these property exhibitions, we actually booked on to a four day inspection trip to the Costa Blanca (an area of Spain that we knew absolutely nothing about). The trip itself was a very arduous and tiring one - early starts and late finishes kept under the watchful eye of our representative with no free time to ourselves, driven up and down the coast in a mini-bus with other prospective buyers, tramping over building sites, being shown properties that were of no interest to us at all. We were shown so many properties in so many locations that in the end everything became such a blur – we were sure that we would return home with the prospect of buying a home in Spain still a dream. However, on the morning we were due to leave, we were shown a property that fitted our requirements and so put down a reservation deposit – our dream was beginning to turn into a reality. As the property was bought “off plan” and was not going to be completed for another eighteen months this suited us fine as this meant that we could spread the payments over this period.

In the months following that inspection trip, our views about the apartment being just a holiday home changed rapidly. My husband and I both held professional jobs, he was a Personnel Manager and had been with the same company for over twenty years and I was a full time Lecturer in Further Education. We had come to the stage where we had had enough of working long hours, were feeling the stresses and strains of our professions and felt that we had no “quality” time. On top of that were the soaring costs of living and above all, the appalling English weather! And so our discussions turned to living, rather than just holidaying abroad. We decided to make the break completely, sell up, and move lock stock and barrel to Spain to start a new and what we envisaged would be a new, happy, relaxed and stress free life!

We arrived in Spain in March 2003. Previous to leaving the UK we had made plans to work as agents for the company who we had purchased our property through, but this fell through. At the ages of 47, we were both too young to retire (and neither wanted to!), so having settled into our new home the next task was to find work. Although escaping from the stresses of work back home, we still wanted work that was both challenging and rewarding. We didn’t have to do much searching as the answer was right there on our doorstep - we were living in an area with beautiful blue flag beaches, bars, restaurants and championship golf courses. And with a growing number of people buying properties as an investment and renting these properties out, the answer was obvious – to set up our own Holiday Rental/Property Management and Airport Transfer business! Having had enough of working for others back in the UK, the prospect of setting up our own business was indeed an exciting and challenging one, especially as this was a completely new field of work to us. With sheer hard work and determination, Rest Assured Property Services (our company) became a successful and growing enterprise, with many holiday makers visiting our holiday homes - and a growing number of them returning again and again!

About eighteen months into our new venture we branched out into new avenues. Our experiences of buying a property abroad were not positives ones and we were sure that we could offer prospective buyers a more professional and personalised service than that which we (and many others) had endured and so we branched out into property sales. 

We soon found it difficult to manage both the rental and the sales side of the business so decided to sell on the Holiday Rental aspect of the business. With the growing demand for people buying properties in rural Spain (or `real Spain´ as it is most often referred to), we found that much of our time was spent travelling the countryside and so not only did we decide to sell on part of our established business, but to sell our home too, and set up home and office in the countryside. 

We now had the double task of finding a suitable location to open up an estate agency and a suitable location to live. And so we spent many weekends travelling the countryside searching for a suitable venue. One day we stumbled upon a quaint little village called Abanilla in the heart of Murcia. We fell in love with this beautiful little village and decided that this was where we were now going to base our business and find a new home.

-Continued below-