So, I've been living here now since April and still thoroughly enjoying it.  Hitting it a little too hard some nights recently perhaps, but nothing that can’t be solved with a weekend de-tox and a few nights in hanging out on YourMarbella.

It looks like Vicks and I have found a house here now after two years of looking which is great. Its hard to find your perfect house here, and one thing I’ve learned is that unless you build you have to compromise, there is no perfect house.  The other thing I’ve learned is that whilst its easy to change a house, you can’t change a plot and so its worth bearing that in mind when buying.  I feel like a property expert on this coast now. I must have seen over 60 villas these last two years in a number of different areas, and have been weighing up the pros and cons of each one.  We should probably start YM.com Estates to share the pain of buying here, but then I think I’ve had enough of Spanish property for one life time.

I have a huge frustration this month and that is that I am not enjoying taking my cars to the port.  Call me paranoid but every time I take my sport car out and park it, even just for one hour, its comes back covered in hand prints.  I’ll never understand the people who feel the need to touch, sit on, lean on or even stand on your car in the port for a photograph.  When in the UK it seems people have more respect, but here in summer I’ve seen people literally mauling the cars in the port.  Vicks saw someone lay on a Ferrari bonnet for a photo last week, these people don’t realise the scratches / dents they can cause from jeans, jackets etc, and it makes me cringe whenever I see it, hence my cars are locked away now until September!  

YM.com seems to be ticking along nicely.  We’ve had a thousand signups and we now have a good base of hard core users. With the holiday makers heading home soon we will focus our marketing a lot more on getting local people to the site and developing the tools to enable our community to invite others more easily.  We don’t want to become another touristy Marbella portal, thats not what we set out to do.  Our mission is to connect similar minded people in Marbella and we feel that post the summer madness we’ll be able to do much more to achieve this without all of the other noise on the coast.

Keep spreading the word about YourMarbella, we need more of you on board to continue building on our early success.  J