On Friday the 1st of March I’m going to jail (many would say about time!) and I need your help to raise the £1,000 bail needed to get me out.
All the money goes to the Isabel Hospice who help care for local people with terminal illness, so a very good cause. If you can spare a fiver or even better tenner, please go to my Just Giving web page:
http://www.justgiving.co.uk/BigBlackHen
Thanks in advance for any help you can give to this worthy cause.
I’ve just discovered a really neat little app on the multimap.com website that allows you to look at a map of an area in terms of relative house prices with red areas being the most desirable (and hence expensive) and green/blue areas being the least desirable (hence least expensive). Either go to multimap.com put in your post code and click on the map – where you can move around to look at other towns or zoom in/out to see larger of smaller areas. Alternatively, try the link below to see house prices in Hertford.
The Government are going to introduce new permitted development rights for owners of commercial office blocks to convert them to residential apartments. Sounds like a good idea. They should extend it to High Street shops as the blight of empty shops needs a solution and it’s not going to come from more reatil outlets!
More positive news, this time from the Council of Mortgage Lenders who cite the fiollowing reasons for optimism in the housing market:
1. The availability of 90%-plus LTV mortgages has more than doubled in the past two years
2. There is ‘much more’ lending at higher LTV levels
3. More first-time buyers are entering the market without assistance
4. Lenders expect to offer more high LTV mortgages this year
5. NewBuy – the controversial taxpayer-backed scheme whereby purchasers of new-build properties only are able to get 95% mortgages – is being extended
6. Lenders are innovating responsibly – the CML cites Lloyds lend-a-hand mortgage, Nationwide’s save-to-buy scheme and Barclays’ new Family Springboard mortgage
7. There is ‘constructive’ forward planning going on within the mortgage industry
8. The outside world is beginning to notice the improvement in lending conditions. The CML says that people are beginning to notice that lenders are open for business.
Read the full article here:
I thought it would be useful to tell local businesses a short history of my involvement with BNI networking and why it works for my business in generating quality leads.
When I opened an office in Hertfordshire, having previously been down in Somerset, I was invited to various networking events but I found them to be too informal to really benefit a business such as mine. All anyone seemed to want to do was to sell to me! Then I got invited to BNI in St Albans which was a very different proposition with its focus on accountability and results.
I decided to give it a go and joined the Chariots Chapter in March 2011. As recommendations have always been my biggest source of new clients I felt it was right for my business model. I had a good year learning the ropes of network marketing and getting a lot of…
