19-OCT - Sat - The deal is sealed!

Yep, the papers have been signed. After lots of research, plenty of questions to all sorts of professionals and lots of personal inspections, we have found the ONE. When we came to Bali, we were wondering what is going to happen on our return to Australia, with our business plan of starting a café/bakery “on ice”, and slowly a new idea of setting up something here in Bali started taking shape. After discarding various ideas, buying a holiday rental property for us to manage and market just stuck! Step 1: find a property at the right price and the right location! Hence we visited various real estate agents, making sure to stick with the big global names, as they are more likely to “play by the rules”, we found a couple of contenders and inspected a selection of properties. Step 2: market research! Once we identified the strip of road of our interest, we scooted along it and listed every single hotel, villa, bungalow, shack we could find. This allowed us to then research how much our future competition charges for a nightly stay, high and low season, in order to determine how much we could charge, without pricing ourselves out of the market and still make a profit. Step 3: What are the legal requirements and regulations for foreigners to purchase property in Bali? The only way was to get it from the horse’s mouth: a notaris = lawyer. We walked into one of them and found a lovely lady behind an ancient typewriter (the Swiss lad’s hearth was beating faster, seeing a beautiful Olympia, a worthy museum piece, still in daily action!). Through broken English and lots of intuition, these lads were made aware there is another notaris that specialises in real estate and given the directions to it. We got the answers we needed. Step 4: Narrow all the candidates down to one! Our future property! Luck, faith, destiny and the good luck coin we found at Uluwatu temple must have helped us along, as after starting a conversation with the manager of one of the locations we had our eye on, we were introduced to the owner, who took one look at us and was all smiles: “family”! Well, after showing us around his complex and giving us a couple of options, we pretty much found what we wanted: perfect location, perfect sized property and right price! All the right ingredients to start our project on a smaller and more manageable scale! A couple of days of negotiations, conversations, drinks, paper work and here we are: deposit paid, papers signed! So much easier to deal with the seller directly, an Australian, paper work in English, a veteran of Balinese business dealings. Next week the owner is taking us furniture and accessories shopping, it’s all happening! Objective having the property ready for this Christmas! Only one thing left to do: CELEBRATE! We treated ourselves to a restaurant on our new “strip of road” (more market research for our customers) and instead of eating two huge mains, selected five starters. For once we chose to have Western dishes and we were not disappointed, Olive Restaurant is a fine dining experience! The night was young, and as we had something special to celebrate and being a Saturday night, off we went to the gay clubs for a boogie and drinks till late into the night! The details of it are [censured] – ask us in person! Wow! Life is indeed full of surprises when one dears to take the plunge (with your eyes wide open and brain switched on)!