I am taking part in the exchange in the Canary Islands in Spain. My host is a small company operating in the real estate sector.
During the last few weeks I was able to participate fully in the exchange in several modalities: working from home (or actually from an outdoor location), working in the office and working on-site, both with and without clients present. It was interesting to notice how much work in this industry can be done remotely these days. Traditionally work of an estate agent required a lot of travelling: appointments with the seller, prospective buyers, other agents and specialists. All this required synchronisation of everybody’s busy schedules and cost a lot of time. It would have been especially challenging for my host, for his clients normally live thousands of kilometres away from the properties they want to buy. Luckily all this hassle has been greatly reduced thanks to the Internet. Instead of having multiple appointments with the potential clients which would need to spend substantial amount of time on flying to and from the Canary Islands, we were able to visit the property in question just once, film it thoroughly and send the footage to all the interested parties.
Another area of work which especially caught my attention was registering a small business in Spain by non-residents. This is something we worked on for one of my host’s clients and this is exactly what I will need to do if I decide to move forward with my business plan. I learned that also in this area it is possible to minimise physical presence just to a few hours and get all the work done by professionals who specialise in these matters. Thanks to the exchange I was able to learn all these things almost effortlessly and with a high degree of confidence, instead of spending long hours on searching and comparing various sources of information.
I also kept collecting data for my potential future business. It turned out that the current market conditions are even better than when I wrote my business plan. The prices I would be selling at almost doubled comparing to the last year, while the potential cost remained largely unchanged. This development gave me another reason to proceed with my business plan as soon as I will gain enough knowledge and confidence in this area.
