Property Sales in France, French homes for sale and home rentals

Background

My personal background is with computers (R&D and marketing) since 1961 and filming/photography since 1968. We moved with a young family to live in France in 1991.

I worked on distributed networking and early uses of the Internet from 1983 to 1991 and I started serious Internet marketing with my own site, www.1stVacations.com, a website I created in 1998 to advertise two apartments owned by us - at this time www.RentalsFrance.com was also registered along with other relevant names to develop Internet marketing tools for this personal service - other local owners joined us and the websites have gained strong positioning and credibility, and are long-standing websites in all major search engines. My original aim was not to create an advertising site, but to develop a travel and booking company using the Internet.

The rapid success of these websites for rental properties in France was developed into a booking service based in the south of France, in the first year bookings with a value in excess of 1.2 million euro were generated. We were then instructed by the French immobilier societies (FNAIM) and the local tax authorities to stop trading in this way as it is illegal in France unless we are a registered travel agent or estate agent. To do this would take several years and incur huge set-up and running costs.

The aim of the company, now registered in the UK as 1stVacations Ltd, was changed from taking and arranging bookings to direct advertising in 2002. The websites retained popularity and good search engine positioning, which continue to be maintained by strong content and careful, well established marketing.

Advertising was aimed at both agency and private individuals. However, I have always believed that a site which is basically a classified listing site is limited and vulnerable. From a handful of advertising sites in 1997 to the thousands of vacation property listing sites today - many offering free advertising to get subscribers - the market is crowded and confused and the cost of advertising has fallen. Owners are offered a huge choice of advertising sites and it is impossible for any site to guarantee a return for advertising spent.

The drop in property bookings, significantly agency (catalogue company) bookings, for French properties in 2003 and 2004 has led to several of the larger agencies cancelling their rentals programs in France from 2005. The growth in traffic for the websites and the need for private owners to get more efficient and effective advertising encouraged us to develop a better method where advertising is paid by results, not as a passive classified service.

The Pay Per Click advertising model pioneered by GoTo.com (now part of Yahoo) and the development by Google of the highly successful Adsense advertising plan removed much of the uncertainty of Internet advertising, but these systems have the serious flaw that it is still easy to defraud advertisers by invalid "clicking" by competitors or partner advertisers who share the revenue from Google and Yahoo. (I know both Google and Yahoo are aware of this and take serious action if it is discovered, but the reports indicate that up to 30% of "click through's" are invalid.)

I developed a system based on a "Pay Per Action" (PPA) model in 2003 and employed this in the RentalsFrance.com and 1stPropertySales.com websites in 2004 with my "Pay Per Enquiry" and "Pay Per Lead" initiative. Interestingly the PPA system is only now being "discovered" by the search engines. see http://www.snap.com/about/cpa_explain.php

This "Pay Per Action" system of advertising is now being recognised as an important development of the Internet in the same way that Pay Per Click (with the many attendant problems) has been responsible for the success of Google and Yahoo.

As the first website to publicise a "Pay Per Enquiry" and "Pay Per Lead" service, 1stVacations now has some protectable copyright and innovative designs. Constant investment has been made in software development to create a unique Pay Per Action advertising service.

Since 2002 I have not tried to expand the user base or the websites, but concentrated on developing the PPA services.

Realising the need to have more skills and support to develop the ideas and opportunities I started looking for partners, workers or investors early in 2005. The immediate need to restructure the equity in my company, due to the new legislation making it impossible for me to continue this from France, has changed this to a need to find a more strategic partnership or partnerships.

All the equity and products are owned by the UK company 1stVacations Ltd - this company is wholly owned by me personally.

Objectives

After 10 years of attempting to set up and operate a company in France I now accept that this is impractical. The restrictions and high costs of employment and administration discourage any effort or investment in France. In addition any service such as tourism or property is strictly regulated and the restrictive practices actively discourage new initiatives.

Importantly, from April 2006, as a French resident, I cannot own the control of any overseas company as this would then be recognised as a French company and must fall within the controls and restrictions of any relevant legislation in France. In effect for my property rentals and sales websites I could not continue.

The aim is to find a partner, or partners, who will acquire some (majority) equity of my company and supply resources and skills to develop the company (or a new venture incorporating its assets).

The opportunity is substantial as I have gained a big advantage in the perception of the PPA marketing models and have two working websites utilising this technology. www.RentalsFrance.com and www.1stPropertySales.com are working and viable websites offering corporate and individual advertisers, agencies and owners the most cost effective route to market and prospecting for clients.

The level of investment I am looking for is not large, I am not seeking to sell out but to get resources in where I can develop and market these opportunities - my skills are in sales and marketing, not technical software or IT. I am much more interested in skills to complement my input and to enable me to expand the opportunities.

Assets

Eight years of highly visible placement in major search engines - try these, and hundreds of similar searches in Google, Yahoo or MSN - rentals in france
- vacation villa in france
- villas to rent in france
- holiday villa in france
- vacation rentals in france

- The current Google PR is 5 - it has been 6, this is a log scale calculated to base 8 so it can be assumed we are high in the PR of 5 ratings.

- the Alexa rating is 49,000

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=rentalsfrance.com

this has been under 25,000 (the lower the better, Google have a Traffic rank of 3 - Microsoft of 11)- again I have not been able to develop this (as a comparison a good competitor site which I rate highly is frenchconnections.co.uk, currently at 79,000 traffic rank,

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=frenchconnections.co.uk

- this is well below us. These are based on user ratings of the top ten million websites in the world which puts rentalsfrance.com in the top 0.5% of all websites worldwide.

As investment and effort have been to get the PPA models operating, the increase of traffic and maintaining statistics have not been a priority. I am now in the position where I can devote time to traffic development, but overall I am not interested in high volumes of visitors but high levels of enquiries - for Rentals we have seen over 15,000 unique enquiries in the last 12 months and for sales in the test period may 2004 to may 2005 we had 18,000 enquiries.

Current page views (not including robots) are from 5,000 to 10,000 a day.

This is indicative of what can be done with my websites - I can market this much more aggressively but have done little placement optimisation for over two years due to the effort spent attempting to find a way to trade within the French system.

I own some good names for websites - I started buying URL's in 1997. The .com sites are most important to me as this is the generic identity for websites. I have never seen the UK or France as the prime market and have always focused marketing on the profile of English speaking Internet users - here is a current list of websites I operate - many are simple 301 redirected to the major sites - there is a list of relevant sites owned by 1st vacations Ltd at

http://francevoila.com/websites/

During the last two years an investment of over £180,000 has been put into the software development and systems designed to operate my Pay Per Action websites. This was designed from the "ground-up" and was all done in house. The cost of contracting this out would have been several times larger and we achieved a very high level of operability with innovative features. This is all based on MySQL/php. The user and administration interfaces are robust and the sites have been operating successfully for over a year. More work is needed to polish and strengthen these systems, but all main development and debugging is now complete.

The websites are making money - they are well below their potential due to lack of time for marketing input and the need to present the service, but without any input they are earning over £2,000 a month in passive mode.

There are no liabilities, all accounts are paid and all registration and hosting fees are paid (apart from a disagreement with Rackspace of about £200). Re-hosting is preferred, but with thousands of pages and several databases to transfer this is not trivial and I need technical assistance with this (hence the disagreement with Rackspace).

Accounts for the company are fully up to date and all outstanding fees paid. The year ends on June 30. As a single owner company we have not needed, or wanted, to show substantial profits so I keep income under the tax threshold paying surplus as salary.

The rentals database has over 2,000 properties listed - there are 600 registered owners each scheduled to pay an average of £120 per annum. The aim of this site was for development with larger agencies and catalogue companies - I found that management of these accounts with the existing accounting systems was unsatisfactory - companies like Quality Villas were not accurate or honest with their reporting and this resulted in under-invoicing of over £60,000 in 2004. The current software has eliminated this loss by selling the contact information, with payment in advance.

Other companies, such as First Choice, have now cremoved the French villa rental program from their offerings. Other major groups I have dealt with, for example Cendent, are still under-utilising the Internet for direct marketing and are reliant on agency sales. Agency commission income was excellent revenue when I acted as a sales operation in France, but this had to be stopped due to French legislation. With a viable partnership with a call-center or sales operation this could be reactivated.

1stPropertySales.com was created in 2004. This is a much larger market than vacation rentals and the branding of the "1st" group of companies is reflected in the website registrations and the logo. The site is operational but I have kept back marketing and further development until I have the working resources to do this outside of France.

Having a dedicated server (and backup server) I also host other third party websites - this could be expanded but I have selected only sites which I can control or have a creative input. This keeps the IP addresses "clean", I use a block of 32 separate IP identities for the sites. The income offsets the cost of having the dedicated server. There are currently over 20 third party sites being hosted on the server. Some paid hosted sites include

http://paintfrance.com/
http://chezroo.com/
http://stmartial.com/

In the case of ChezRoo and StMartial I also own the domain names.

Requirements

I am looking for involvement from a person, people or a company who will do due diligence and then involve themselves in working to develop this business. It need not be a full time involvement.

I am open to all ideas as to the level of involvement.

The requirement is for some technical resources, although these can be bought in very easily, the world seems to be awash with IT specialists in the needed disciplines. More importantly I need management and financial expertise to structure and strengthen the operations and then I can put my effort into development and marketing.

As I have to be a minority shareholder, I am looking for a way that this can be done, either by selling part of my company or working within a larger framework with a minority involvement.

I could be interested in selling off all the operations and assets.

What I am offering is 8 years of established websites and development - a 6 month head-start for website recognition (all sites are out of the Google "sandbox") a two year lead in PPA applications and technology - a profitable operation which can rapidly be grown - valuable names and identity with an established client base of over 1,000 - a double opt-in mailing list regularly mailed to of over 10,000 individuals. An archive of over 1,000 copyright articles and items relating to visiting, living and working in France. IN all websites content is vital and original material and fresh content is essential for successful Internet marketing.

Opportunities

Using the PPA technology, I have also looked at the viability of developing a "niche" search engine for property. Substantial development has been done with this and working on the PPA (Pay Per Action) model, revenues would be substantial. Adapting this into the real estate and rentals sites would create a very strong portal and have significant marketing advantages. Many of the websites were originally conceived as focused portals http://goto-france.com for example.

With the limited resources which I have been able to deploy in development and marketing, I have continued the publishing side which delivers information about France and property. The advertising revenue from Google Adsense, and also from this month Yahoo, has been very useful. This is not currently seen as an area for significant expansion, but it does focus on what I believe is the primary function on the Internet which is as a publishing medium. http://francevoila.com/ and http://fblog.com/.

By branding under the "1st" logo http://1stpropertysearch.com/ , I am moving away from a solely French service. Although France will continue to be an important location for vacations and real estate (for example, from next April in the UK Sipps can be invested in overseas property BUT only "approved" locations will be allowed by the pension trustees and France is about the only country likely to be approved at present).

Summary

The opportunity to complete the marketing of a PPA portal, search engine and advertising service is substantial. With proven websites and services I am a long way ahead of other travel sites and we are not competing with the general search engines.

I have to change the method of operation for my company by April 2006 due to new French legislation.

This creates an opportunity for a new partner, or partners, to work with me to achieve a highly profitable service in a short time as most of the development work is done and I am already established on the Internet.

My preferred course is to continue to develop my Internet marketing concepts and expand these into other market areas, services and products and geographical regions. To do this I need working partnerships or a working partnership with a person, people or a company which can add resources, capital and services to complement my ideas and marketing experience.

I am prepared to allocate or sell more than half the capital value of the company whilst retaining an interest and revenue - or I would consider selling the whole entity (with restrictive covenants or retained input for a period).

Outline Of Working Proposal