Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:26 pm

This is a slightly odd post for Forest Software as it is not directly related to small businesses but bear with me and you might even see a business opening.

I was talking to a small business owner the other day who had invested in a holiday home in the USA that he intended to visit on a regular basis and let out when he was not there.  He already did this with a villa that he owned in Cyprus and was enjoying a regular income from that so it seemed a natural progression to look elsewhere.

Oddly though, when I asked where the new holiday home was in the US it wasn’t in the areas that I expected it to be –  confidently expecting the answer to be somewhere in Florida (Orlando, Miami or on the Gulf Coast somewhere) I was a little surprised to hear that it was in Palm Springs in California.  He seemed confident though that this was an area that people would visit from the UK and that he would be able to let the property fairly easily.

One area that interested me was how he was managing to insure overseas properties – was there a problem with taking out insurance in Cyprus for example when the policies would be written in Greek and paid for in Euro’s or in the US when the premiums would be in dollars (what about exchange rates)?  It seems though that there are companies based in the UK (such as The Bluefin Group)  that will arrange a UK based policy, written in English, either in isolation or as part of a single policy also covering the main UK home, for properties in most countries around the world that can be paid for in sterling.

He then went on to tell me that he had also found someone to keep an eye on the American property while it was empty – apparently in the USA there is a service called Home Watch that visits holiday homes or homes that are vacant and checks out that everything is secure, that there are no problems and to give the property a “lived in” look.  Having signed up for a home watch in Palm Springs meant that he felt that his house was being looked after when he wasn’t there and didn’t have any holidaymakers staying there.

I wondered about this idea for the UK, I know that there are “house-sitters” (in fact I used such a service to look after the pets when I went on holiday recently as it worked out cheaper than having to put them all into kennels etc) but that only really works for holidays.  If you have a holiday home (as many people seem to in some areas of the UK) would you pay someone to keep an eye on it for you, going in once every so often to check for leaks, making sure that post is not visible on the floor through the letter box and generally making the home looked lived in?  This is not something that I would be interested in doing but if you have the time and the experience (here in the UK you might want or need to be CRB checked as well) and are based in an area where there are plenty of holiday homes it could well be an opening for a small business.