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Everything you always wanted to know about France - from France |
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France - Make your dream come true.
Open letter to all my readers, advertisers and owners of rental property in France Eight years ago I had a dream, to create a vacation property rentals website which would be the best in the world. I wanted to do this because we had invested everything we had into a medieval ruin in the South of France to make a family home and two apartments which we could rent to vacationers, this was in a little village called Nizas. At that time, 1996, this was pioneering stuff both for using the Internet for marketing and for investing in French property for a better quality of life than we had in the UK It worked very well, we got bookings for over 85% of the year, met many wonderful people who shared our home with us - many are constant friends - and I was able to concentrate on working on the Internet at an exciting time. These were exciting times on the Internet, the "bubble and bust" was three years away, the aim of most of us making sites was to share our enthusiasm and do what is now the mission statement of one of the biggest corporations in the world "Do No Evil". We had setbacks, all my fault for not knowing the unknowable regulations governing enterprise in France - you can read about all this in the continuous story from 1999 in my newsletter http://nizas.com/newsletters/archives/ (perhaps I invented the first Weblog). As the Internet grew and more and more people came to France to look, see and buy, we grew fast. From a simple site with a couple of our own apartments, we grew to a major Vacations site with over 4,500 properties on offer and over a million visitors a month. But - I was finding it impossible to develop an English marketing website living in France - investment was needed for software and marketing and, in France, I have neither the structure to enable investment nor the skills I needed to develop. However, working hard we grew stronger and more visible in the increasingly important search engines until RentalsFrance was (and still is) the leading site to be found for many important search terms. The systems I had were inadequate for our needs so for the past four years I have been seeking a strategic partner to work with me. There were several false starts, but last year I found a dynamic and talented company in the UK run by entrepreneurs who had the experience and resources I needed to make the next step. This was also an urgent thing for me to do as I had to restructure the ownership of my trading company, 1stVacations Ltd which is still in the UK (from April this year a French resident may not own the majority shares of a foreign corporation without that company being liable to French legislation, as this would incur huge overheads and the need for licensing, I would have had to stop trading). On December 15 I agreed with my new partners, Fubra Ltd, in the UK to transfer ownership of the trading websites. I would still be involved in the promotion and marketing and hoped to build a far stronger structure (I was always taught in business that owning a small percentage of a forest was better than owning one tree). Since then I have seen the websites and business, which Carole and I fought so hard to create, collapse. RentalsFrance has not worked correctly since the beginning of this year and today not one single property can be seen. Worse, the emails have mostly failed and owners I have been dealing personally with for many years cannot even write to me. It has been a heartbreaking time and I am sincerely sorry for all the delays and inconvenience caused to my advertisers and to all visitors to my old sites. I believe these are all problems which will be resolved and I believe that the property rental and property sales sites I started will give the communities they serve an excellent service. I know I will do all I can to make this happen. Unfortunately the dates and deadlines I have been give have now passed and all I can see is further deterioration of the services on RentalsFrance.com. I know things often get worse before they get better. All this is a personal disaster for me and my family, obviously our income from the sites through advertising and subscriptions has stopped and the anxiety and frustration caused are things I had hoped to avoid. I know it will take many weeks, probably months, of hard work to claw back to where we were just last November, but we will do it. So - what I am doing is this. I have still got an old personal site I started in 1998 http://www.Nizas.com. I kept this as it was only about our holiday snaps and I never promoted it. But, the big advantage is that it is indexed by Google, has been for 8 years and is a "white hat" site. I have tidied it up this week and added a lot of functions for visitors - it has been invigorating, after months of setbacks, to go back to what I was doing in 1996. The contextual adverts on Nizas.com, mostly from Google, will earn money - they also give a lot of relevant information to visitors - this income will help me keep working. For owners of properties and suppliers other services I can immediately offer an advertising section. I have put this online already and it offers most of the features that the other sites have - such as adding photos and editing directly yourself. The big advantage is that this service I am offering is free and always will be for everyone who has already registered with me, even when I increase the services given and we get back to number one in the search engines. I will be very soon adding calendars and booking services as well as payment facilities by credit card etc. This is not planned to replace the RentalsFrance.com sites. It is a new and valuable addition. When the other sites are back with all the features I expect to see from Fubra, this will be a world-beating combination. Obviously in one day I have not created another ebay, but, the forums work, the classifieds section is operating and there are new improved search tools on the site. Google have now indexed thousands of pages and it is a running start. The site is simple, it could do with some pretty graphics and design, but it works and it is choc-full of information. All the software is fully tested and running. The site will be improved rapidly. I am asking for your help. If you have anything to advertise, a rental, service or are already advertising - please go to the site and put on an advert http://nizas.com/cgi-bin/kcscripts/classifieds/home.cgi - it is free and always will be for everyone who does this now or is already advertising. If you have a property for sale or for rent please add this to the brand new service on the property pages http://www.nizas.com/estate/mojoEstate.cgi - this will always be free for you and for all upgrades - do register now. If you cannot find a relevant classification for a region, country or property type, service etc, let me know and will add it. If you have nothing to advertise but would like to find something, make an announcement or contact us, please write in the forum http://nizas.com/phpBB2/ - look through the site to see if there are any adverts which are helpful to you. If you have ideas, comments or grievances, please write to me on the forum pages - I know many owners have been unable to contact me as most of my email services have been dead recently. Please go to the forum http://nizas.com/phpBB2/ and write to me - add new topics and make suggestions - make this into a real community - we can do it - I will be writing this week to over 130,000 people who have contacted me in recent months, these are people who have personally enquired about property in France to buy or rent. If you have a website which is relevant, please ad a link to http://www.Nizas.com - I will reciprocate and add any relevant ones to the new search engine directory on the site (you can do this yourself now ) http://nizas.com/cgi-bin/kcscripts/search/addsite.cgi . Please ask your friends to join our community http://nizas.com/cgi-bin/kcscripts/refer-a-friend/raf.cgi , there are links to do this on the site, and ask them to visit the information pages if they need to find out anything about France. All these pages are only a few hours old, the paint is still wet, you may be the first person to ever visit some of the pages - but they work - in a couple of weeks, with your help, we can make a valuable community and help many people who want to visit or live in France I still have a dream. Tony Tidswell February 22 2006 Montblanc South of France |