We now believe that they had no intention of honouring our contract and instead devoted their time in finding ways of cheating us from our share all from quite early on. The first method was one of them constantly failed to pay their share of the maintenance and planning costs. Causing us some serious cash flow problems.

I specially flew back to Birmingham and arranged a meeting to try to resolve everything and I was really relieved, as we did all come to an agreement on how to proceed. Yet within a day of my return to Spain they had changed their minds! I held three meetings with them, and each time having achieved an agreement before flying back, the same thing happened yet again!

My last attempt was to offer to buy them all out, I was sure we could get the funds, but although my offer would have given them a particularly good profit (nearly as much as they would have received had they accepted the 7.3 million offer) but they refused to sell. Since then, I have done my best to forget about it! No more news to date, except there are now lots of large redevelopments going on all around our land and the Jewellery Quarter is now considered a desirable place to live.

After this I decided to let them do whatever they like, as I knew that sometime this area will be redeveloped and my property would have to be bought, so I would wait and let any developer come to me.

Quite soon after they turned down the offer, the property market slumped, and the Investors fell out with us, and we suspect with each other! jncohen.net/current


Retirement and Selling Our House

There were three reasons why Trudy and I decided to sell our home; (1) the value of houses in our road had suddenly increased beyond belief, (2) having 5 bedrooms for just the two of us was far too much, (3) I was ready to retire.

There were a lot of traumas involved, we had so many viewings and thought we had a buyer several times, then at last a deal was done. But our buyer delayed the completion date a few times, making us feel uneasy.

We had found an apartment that we really liked in La Alcazaba, and we knew it would not be available for long. Ideal, as it was close to my parents, but before we could proceed, we had to have sold Hamilton Avenue.

What made the move even more complicated, was that we also planned to buy Trudy’s parent’s home in Switzerland from Josephine (Trudy's mother) where Trudy had grown up. This was to help her, as she was finding the house and garden too much for her to cope with and she wanted to buy a flat, additionally Trudy really wanted to have it.

The price we were getting was sufficient to buy both properties and finally we had a completion date by 1st December 2002. By then unfortunately, the flat we wanted had been sold within 2 days of our seeing it. Needless to say, we were terribly upset!

Strangely, we learnt that the buyer's main interest had been to buy apartments at La Alcazaba, with the sole intention of improving them before selling them on, he had already done this several times. Luckily for us, he found another larger apartment that needed a lot more doing to it, and he preferred to buy that one, so we were able to negotiate the purchase again.

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