Reduce electricity bills by controlling your air conditioning units

One thing guaranteed to drive your electricity bill sky high is air conditioning units left on when not really required, particularly by holiday guests.   

Most guests are more concerned with enjoying their holiday than worrying about turning the air conditioning off before they go out, so units are often left running for the duration of their visit, and even left switched on at the end of their stay.

No need to worry! Now we can help you with installation of a special electrical device that limits unnecessary electricity consumption caused by misuse of air-conditioning units, as well as reducing wear and tear on the machines, and the negative impact on the environment.

How does it work?

By simply pushing a switch on a built-in electrical device, the air conditioning system is supplied with power for a fixed period (we recommend setting it for 8 hours) after which it automatically switches itself off.

Should the user decide that they want it on again, they merely press the button to allow it to run for a further 8 hours.

Where can it be fitted?

In the case of ducted units it is designed to be mounted in the ceiling cavity alongside the air conditioning machine, or for individual wall-mounted units, neatly hidden in the fuse board. The operating switch itself should be mounted as close as possible to the fuse board or alongside the air conditioning control panel, but other options are available. The only visible change within the property would be something that looks like a light switch.

What is included?

The standard package includes a single-phase relay, a timer, a push switch, all cabling and installation. The push switch quoted is a standard white model.

Most units are installed with no additional charge, however if we find that re-wiring on the fuse board or additional components are required we will consult you before installation. The package can also be extended to include 3-phase installations, remote control switches, multiple relays, etc.

How much does it cost?

The standard package costs 310€ + IVA, including all parts and fittings. Instructions on usage in English and Spanish are also included.

 How do I get one fitted?

If you need to talk in more detail about the unit or would like to arrange for one to be installed, then please call our Operations Department on (0034) 952 83 95 95 or email us with your order or questions at info@homecareontheweb.com or visit our website for any information on Costa del Sol Property Management

Get a good paint job for the New Year!

Take advantage of our special January offer for Costa del Sol property maintenance and freshen up all the interiors in your property from as little as 800€ – including materials!

Take a look at these highly competitive prices and see below for what they include:

Two-bedroom apartment       800€

Three-bedroom apartment

or two-bedroom townhouse   999€

Three bedroom townhouse   1250€

All prices are plus 16% IVA (Spanish VAT)

 If your property type is not shown above, then please contact Costa del Sol Property Management Specialists HomeCareontheWeb  for a personal estimate for your property’s paint job.

If you’d like your ceilings painted as well, just add 15% to above prices for painting in white or the same colour as the walls.

Prices include:

• Protection of floors and furniture
• Filling of small holes and cracks
• Painting of all internal walls (excluding tiled walls)
• One coat of good quality paint
• Good range of standard colours (white/cream/magnolia)
• Cleaning up upon completion.

Prices exclude:

• Major repairs to plasterwork
• Painting ceilings or woodwork
• Paint in special colours
• Specialist finishes, such as anti-damp paint, varnishes, glazes, etc.

If you’d like to book your property in for a paint make-over, call our Operations Department now on (0034) 952 83 95 95 or email us at info@homecareontheweb.com to find out about the other property maintenance services we offer, visit our website.

Notes: This special offer expires on 28^th February 2010 and paint jobs have to be scheduled for completion before 30^th April 2010. Payment terms are 50% in advance and 50% on completion.

Take advantage of traditional time for booking holidays

No sooner are the Christmas festivities over than the New Year holiday booking season starts! Every other TV ad seems to be for some far-off destination or idyllic retreat, as travel companies entreat us all to ‘book early’ to secure our perfect holiday dream.

This frenzy of sales activity happens all over Europe, however some Europeans are more prone to getting their holiday plans organized in advance than others. In particular Novasol find that their clients in Germany, Scandinavia, Holland and France do have a tendency to book their holidays early – during the months of January, February and March.

With this is mind we have scheduled with Novasol to include the Costa del Sol as a key holiday destination in their newsletter which launches to their main markets in January. This means over 35,000 emails going out in German to their best clients – those who have holidayed with them before and who re-book with them year on year.

If you have already registered your property with Novasol you’re now in a prime position to benefit from this marketing activity. And if you haven’t – and are still thinking about it – then please act now to ensure you can take advantage of this first wave of 2010 holiday booking activity.

All you have to do is call us on (0034) 952 83 95 95 or email us at info@homecareontheweb.com to get your property registered. Don’t forget that we’ll help you fill out the contract, supply the photos and the floor plan – and it’s all completely free!

What are things really like on the Costa del Sol?

Things to smile about on the Costa del Sol

There’s no doubt that 2009 has been a tough year, with the global recession and property market slump leaving a lot of businesses and homeowners in difficulties. However, tourist and residents on the Costa del Sol have had some things to smile about this year and there are positive signs on the horizon for 2010.  Read on for some great reasons to feel good about living, working or owning a property in Spain.

Marbella on a mission to improve integration and boost tourism

On 4^th December Jose Luis Hernandez, Councillor for Tourism at Marbella Town Hall spoke at the ‘Women in Business’ Meeting about his plans for the city and what his administration are doing to make 2010 an exceptional year for the city.

Any homeowner in Marbella and the surrounding areas will be keen to know how the Town Hall are planning to improve the delivery of public services in the district. In addition, if you happen to be a non-resident homeowner who uses your property as a holiday home and are trying to attract holiday rentals for extra income, the Town Hall’s plans to tempt more tourists to the Coast will also be of interest, especially in the face of the economic crisis and increasing competition from other destinations.

 One of the key things that Jose Luis stressed was that in order to improve the services for all the local inhabitants, the international residents who live here for more than six months per year must register. Currently the Town Hall’s incoming budgets are based on 136,000 inhabitants, but in any year they have around 220,000 consuming public services. This big gap in the figures is causing a problem in being able to ensure the services provided are sufficient.

Registering (called Empadronamiento in Spanish) is easy and there are no tax liabilities. All it takes is a trip to the Town Hall with your documents. By simply doing so, you will enable much needed funds to come into the area. If you want to know how to do it, visit Marbella Town Hall’s website

To make Marbella a better place in which to live, do business or spend a holiday, the Town Hall are encouraging the international residents to integrate by offering free Spanish courses and creating opportunities for different nationalities, adults and children alike, to meet up. Please contact your local Foreigner’s Office for more information on these opportunities.

Furthermore, to improve tourism, Marbella Town Hall are concentrating their promotional efforts on a series of high-profile events, encouraging international companies to hold their launch events here, and the Town Hall will be setting up a Tourism Consortium to allow public and private sectors to work together to promote this great city.

One aspect of this promotion involves the launch of a viral marketing campaign to tell people why Marbella is a great place to live and work. To do this they are working with local businesses like HomeCareontheWeb.com to help us all promote Marbella to the world. The Town Hall is distributing HomeCareontheWeb.com articles about the area to the International Press; and in addition we are continuing our email marketing and advertising efforts to boost the profile of the company and the area.

If you want to bring more people to Marbella we all need to do our bit! By promoting your property online, to friends, family, community groups and local media you can increase rentals and bring people to the area. We can provide you with articles about the area if you have links with any local press or travel websites and together we can make 2010 a fantastic year for the Coast.

This information is brought to you free from HomeCareontheWeb.com property management Spain to support the great work of the Marbella Town Hall

Earn more income with the HomeCareontheWeb and Novasol Affiliate Scheme

Novasol, Europe’s largest holiday home rental company, has chosen HomeCareontheWeb.com as their exclusive partner to help them grow and develop the Spanish holiday rentals market.

Novasol has been operating as a provider of holiday home rentals for more than 40 years, with a current portfolio of 30,000 properties available to rent in 21 countries. What’s more, they book more than a quarter of a million holiday rental weeks a year!

Together Novasol and HomeCareontheWeb.com can offer homeowners in Spain two things, the means to obtain more holiday rentals, and the means to have those holiday rentals managed professionally at a local level if they require it.

Currently HomeCareontheWeb.com are seeking more properties in Spain to rent out to Novasol holiday clients – and we need your help to find them! So if you have clients, friends, family or colleagues, who have holiday homes and want more rentals then please tell us – and we will pay you a commission for each referral who signs up. 

To find out more about the tremendous advantages to homeowners of registering with Novasol visit our webpage here. The key benefits are:

• it’s free to have your property listed with Novasol
• Novasol promote your property via their network of 11 individual language websites which receive 15 million hits each year
• Novasol also feature your property in over 2 million brochures distributed to 15,000 travel agents and past holiday clients.

Through their marketing, Novasol currently obtain an average of 10 weeks of rentals per year for apartments and 20 weeks per year for villas with pools, which is pretty impressive!

Novasol not only represents a great opportunity for homeowners looking to rent out their properties for holidays, it is also a chance for just about anyone to earn extra income by recommending holiday homeowners, who they know want rentals, to sign up with Novasol.

The HomeCareontheWeb.com Affiliate Scheme has been operating successfully for two years now and is free to join. In December, we added Novasol holiday home registration as another opportunity for Affiliates to earn extra income.

The scheme rewards you with a commission each time someone you refer signs up either for registering with Novasol (which is free for the homeowner) or for signing up for one of our management packages. So if you are able to think of several people looking to rent out their property, this could be an excellent chance to earn some extra income in these difficult times.

In addition, businesses can earn HomeCareontheWeb.com Affiliate commissions for those clients they refer who rent a property long-term or buy a property from us.

Email info@homecareontheweb.com now for more details of our Affiliate Scheme, or call us on (0034) 952 83 95 95.

Christmas and New Year on the Costa del Sol

If you will be spending the festive period in Spain this year, there’s lots going on. Throughout December there have been events taking place to get us all in the mood. From the beginning of the month the lights have been on, the weather has got more wintery (nothing like the UK though) and the bars and restaurants have been getting into the spirit.

Christmas is a great time to visit the area, but be warned that things are a little different. Christmas Eve is the biggest day for celebration and people don’t head out on New Year until midnight! Make sure you have your siesta, eat at home and then head out very late to join the other revellers. For a good guide to Christmas in Spain, visit Spanish Fiestas website. 

If you are coming with kids, a great resource for family-friendly events is the website Marbella Family Fun. They have a list of all the events going on over the festive period on their Marbella Christmas Events page.

We hope you have a very Merry Christmas no matter where you’re spending it! To make 2010 a prosperous year we can help you gain Spanish property rentals through our fantastic partnership with Novasol, as well as taking the stress out of owning a property with our great value Spanish property management. Visit our website for more information.

Tips for reducing transfer fees from Kyero

Don't pay unneccessary banking charges

If you own a home in Spain you will probably have been struggling with the high bank fees, especially when you have to transfer money from the UK. In their latest newsletter the Spanish property news website Kyero have offered some invaluable tips that we wanted to share with you:

“If you bank in Spain, your bank is probably ripping you off regarding bank charges for transfers. This week, we transferred some money between a Euro bank account in Spain to another Euro bank account in the UK and our bank charged us €63 Euros for the privilege of doing so.

However, a quick phone call later and €62 Euros of that transfer fee had been refunded. Here’s how to do the same with your bank.

In September of this year the European Commission passed regulation 924/2009 which states that charges for transactions offered by your bank have to be the same whether the payment is national or cross-border.

In our case, our bank charges €1 for national transfers, yet persists in applying a percentage based charge for international transfers.

We simply had to remind them of this EC regulation, and hey presto, we had been refunded.

If your bank is less willing to cooperate, you can dob them in to the Spanish national authority and make a formal complaint by emailing The Bank of Spain.

If that fails, you can also and ask the Bank of Spain to mediate a resolution to the problem.

More information about EC Regulation 924/2009 can be found at the European Commission website and Wikipedia.

Spain’s banks have a long history of dodgy charges – especially to foreign clients. Now the EC has actually done something useful to bring those practices to light and, hopefully, stop them”

Get a quote for great-value Property Management in Spain

We’ve updated our website with a new, quick and easy to use quote generator. 

To find out how much it will cost for us to help you earn extra rental income or take care of your Spanish property is now child’s play. Visit our website, fill in our simple form and click ’Submit’ and you will be emailed a personalised quote.

Due to customer demand, we’ve restructured our pricing policy to offer a menu of great value property management options to remove the stress from owning a second home in Spain. We have some great rentals and management deals starting from only 295€ – and some are even free!

So visit our website and find out how little it costs to know that your property is in safe hands. Get a property management quote on our website or call us now on (0034) 952 83 95 95 to discuss your needs further.

Inheritance Tax Explained

Inheritance Tax is a tricky issue for owners of Spanish property and so we have asked our financial planning partners, Siddalls, to give you some uncomplicated advice about how you can handle such tax issues in Spain.

Inheritance Tax is a vast subject but there are some particular features of the Spanish system which can surprise the average Briton. The two main differences to the UK are:

The individual recipient is taxed, not the ‘estate’ of the deceased

There is no ‘spouse-to-spouse’ tax free allowance.

What’s more, ex-pats who are residents in Spain are liable to pay Spanish Inheritance tax on all their assets regardless of where the assets are situated, whilst non-residents only pay Inheritance Tax on assets which are physically located in Spain.

For more information, visit our Money and Tax Advice page on our website which has access to the full Inheritance Tax article, or for more information call our Siddalls adviser, David, on (0034) 685 976 474 or email him at David.Rogers@siddalls.net.