Moving to Mexico: Down to Business

My posts lately have been noticeably infrequent and sparse at best. I'll blame it on the fact that I spend about 9 hours a day working on the website for our business. After a full day staring at the computer screen and wondering when I'll have to go in for a new eye exam (think computer screen burning my pupils), the last thing I want to do is write. I wouldn't say I'm a naturally talented writer. In fact I spent most of my youth watching tv which left me with poor grammatical and verbal skills. It's really only been since college that my writing and reading has reached a level where I feel comfortable communicating online or in a professional setting. The reason why I say all this is that I am constantly proofreading my writing - revising it, changing words and sentence structure. So the 15 minutes it may take to write an entry turns into an hour or even more depending on the depth of my rambling.

I've contemplated for sometime whether to talk about my business in this blog. In the back of my mind I keep thinking "keep business and personal life separate". On the other hand I can think of many advantages to mixing them: more business exposure and more topics to write about. So in the end I've decided to discuss business here as well - perhaps not down to every detail but enough so you can get the idea. Well, here goes.

My partner and I have started a property management and vacation rental business in Playa del Carmen called North American Standards Property Management. We originally came to Mexico in the spring solely with plans of staying two weeks for vacation and had no inclination whatsoever of moving here and starting a business. However we couldn't help but notice the rapid real estate growth in Playa and the need for competent and experience property managers. Considering Allan and I have over 40 years of combined experience in the industry moving here and starting a business seemed like a good idea.

Granted there are many property managers in Playa. Many have been struck with the manana attitude which has lead to many unhappy clients: problems are not addressed quickly enough. Other managers are very good and charge too much. Then there are companies like mine which charge reasonable rates and give best efforts to respond to our client's needs rapidly even with the obstacles of dealing with Mexican maintenance staff who perhaps are on a different time schedule (think laid back beach attitude).

So our website is www.nasplaya.com. We have about 15 vacation rental properties all near the beach and trendy 5th Avenue. We are spending a good deal of time and money on advertising both online and in Playa itself. In the past 24 hours our online ads have been displayed over 95,000 times. Yes, that is correct - almost 100,000 times in 1 day. The online global market is simply mind boggling. Yes, those are exact figures folks - many thanks to those brains at Google. In my next life that's where I'm going to work. Although we are seeing less than 1% of that traffic actually clicking on our ads, we remain hopeful.

Playa del Carmen Condo and Villa Vacation Rentals