Polaris World Uncovered!

Don't Believe All The Hype On All Those Rubbish Polaris World Websites.  We've Got The TRUTH For You About Polaris World Right Here

(Remember, you read it here first)

Monday, 9:54, Murcia, Costa Calida

Dear Polaris World Purchaser

We understand the frustration.  You like the idea of a Polaris World property but you haven't a clue which agent to use and whether it's a good investment or not.  Simply searching for Polaris World property in Google gives you a headache and only makes matters worse..

Look, Google pulls up over 2.5 millions results for the term "polaris world"....

What a nightmare!  Then there's all this bad publicity in the UK about Spanish property which just makes you wonder whether it's worth it at all.

Do we have a solution for you?  Probably not.  But we can help to calm your worst fears by answering some of the most often asked questions about Polaris World, something most agents would never do in public.

The questions below were put to me by Justin of Eye on Spain (the hugely respected Spanish forum website).  The answers are my honest opinions about Polaris World having recently bought there myself too....and loving it!

Here's what we uncover in the interview:

	What's Polaris World all about?
	Golden Partner status, is it worth anything?
	Is Polaris World too big?
	Is there anything in Costa Calida apart from developments?
	So many properties, is Polaris World a good investment?
	Which resort is the best one to buy on?
	Can I trust Polaris World with my money?
	Is everything legal and above board?

Justin: Welcome, Mike.

Mike: Hi Justin.

Justin: Thank you for joining me in the interview today.

Mike: It’s a pleasure.

Justin: Mike works in a company called Sunseeker Homes, which focuses much of its time selling Polaris World property. We’ve invited Mike along today to talk to us about his company but also particularly the Polaris World side of the business. So Mike, could you tell us a bit about how you got started with Sunseeker Homes?

Mike: Yeah, certainly. I ran a financial services business in the UK for many years. I was fortunate enough to buy property myself up here in Spain about eight years ago. When clients of mine, some of whom I’d been dealing with for ten or twelve years, found out that I’d actually bought in Spain, some of them rang up and said, “We’re interested in buying in Spain ourselves. Can you give me any help and advice?” Purely out of courtesy that I give clients, I would invite them in, sit them down, go through my own experiences which – to be honest – were a bit of a nightmare, try and point them in the right direction, give them my own opinions and advice.

Out of that, it grew so that we started recommending two or three companies down on the Costa del Sol and hoped that that would work well. Unfortunately, it didn’t work particularly well because half the time the clients would come back from Spain and ring in. I’d think they would be all excited having found their dream home and they would actually say “To be honest, we were picked up at the airport by an eighteen year old kid who clearly had no knowledge of the Spanish property market, often hadn’t bought a property in England and had never bought in Spain.” A lot of my clients are people who aren’t particularly wealthy but they’re not stupid people. They want good advice, to sit down, discuss taxation and costs and be treated professionally.

They found that, to be honest, they were bussed around to four or five developments where, clearly, the agent wants to push those rather than what they were actually interested in. Eventually, a lot of clients came back to say “You have property there. You do this. You should go and do this yourself.” After a while of sitting in England for however long and running my business for eighteen years, I said “Okay, let’s go to Spain and set up.” We started writing a website and spent about twelve months researching and writing the website and then moved over here about four and a half years ago.

Justin: We get comments from people who use all sorts of agents and we actually tend to get quite a lot of positive feedback from people who’ve used Sunseeker Homes. Is it hard work keeping them all happy?

Mike: To be honest, no. This is what surprises me about Spanish property sellers or even property sellers abroad in general. The standard of service that most companies give is absolutely dire. The people at the top of the companies are generally very, very good but unfortunately the clients don’t get to deal with the people at the top of the company. They deal with commission-only, self-employed salespeople who often have not worked for the company for more than a few weeks. They’ve put in a one-week or two-week training course and then they’re suddenly Spanish property experts. They don’t know about taxation. They often don’t own property in Spain themselves.

I think it’s frustrating, so no, I would say we don’t do anything different rather than how we would want to be treated ourselves. As I know when I bought my first property and the estate agent firstly couldn’t find the property, then knew nothing about it and said “Well, you’ll have to ask a lawyer.” We then short listed the property from four or five down to two that we were interested in. When we rang up again for a second viewing, she was like “What do you mean you want to go and see it again?” We were like “We’d like to go have a look, maybe do some measuring up to re-confirm that we like it.”

It was almost as though it was a complete pain that she had to take us to the property for fifteen minutes. We then decided we wanted to buy that one. From the minute we put our offer in, we never heard from her again until she turns up next spring to collect her thousands of euros in commission. For me, it was a nervous time. We try to help people out. It’s a big step and people don’t seem to realize that.

Justin: Well, Mike, you’ve been in the business for 15 years. How would you say the buyer today has changed from the buyer of two or three years ago?

Mike: Well, fortunately, they seem to be a lot more astute. The heat has gone out of a lot of the market of three or four years ago. We have clients ringing up saying, “I want three of these properties.” Short of not taking their deposits, we would try and say “You are aware that you may have to complete on these if you can’t sell them,” because there are a lot of investors fueling the Costa del Sol market. I think for many reasons that we can touch on, the Costa del Sol market has peaked and people have experienced problems selling on.

Now our clients have changed. They’re a lot more astute. We’re dealing with a lot more people who are going to use the property themselves rather than people who are going to seminars or property shows in the UK and are being promised absolutely ridiculous rates of return and then being disappointed when they can’t double their money in two years. We say to clients, “If you can get a 10%, 15% return per annum, that’s fantastic. You’re not going to get that elsewhere.” Doubling your money is not going to happen these days. I think there’s much more realism in the market, but people also understand the process better.

I’ll admit it – there have been a lot of horror stories, unfortunately. If you look at certain newspapers on the weekend exclaiming the unscrupulous methods that some of the biggest companies in Spain use, I think people need to be aware of them.

Justin: I think people are a lot more savvy now. They look at websites and forums for information.

Mike: It’s like your website, you know. There are lots of forums, lots of comments. We try to always do a good job and we’re fortunate that we get a huge amount of testimonials and referrals. But the day we don’t do a good job will be the day when people start making nasty comments about us on the websites and stuff. That’s always on the forefront of our mind. We don’t want that to happen.

Justin: The property you sell is generally off-plan. How do you see the trend has changed in the off-plan versus resale market? How has it changed in the last few years?

Mike: From my point of view, it hasn’t really changed at all. The problem is that the prices on the Costa del Sol have reached unsustainable levels and, to the infrastructures that are in place and to the services, people are starting to say “It doesn’t add up – they’re charging a premium price and delivering second-rate services.”

We found that our businesses change by client demand. If you said to me four years ago that I’d be doing 99% of my business in the Costa Calida and I’ll be having an office there and I’d be traveling up and down virtually every week and I’d have staff in that area, I would have to say that you were mad because there’s nothing there, really.

We’re still dealing predominantly with off-plan. However, what we’ve seen with Polaris World is that as their Mar Menor Golf Resort is being finished in about two years, they have their second resort, the Terrazas de la Torre, which is their first resort and apartment. Its first completion was approximately eight to ten weeks ago. We’re now finding that some clients who are coming over considering off-plan, they come out so impressed that they don’t wait eighteen months or two years for off-plan. They’re now saying “Can you find me a resale?” Hence we’re opening office there and we’re starting to be quite aggressive and trying to get as many listed properties as possible to try and satisfy the demand now for resales.

Justin: I think the general trend on the Costa del Sol is that more people are buying resales now than off-plan. Off-plan is heading off into the Murcia region now.

Mike: Absolutely. I think more people are buying resales in the Costa del Sol. There’s not that many people buying anything on the Costa del Sol, really, compared to the figures there were two or three years ago. The market is much, much slower. As other people have commented on your interviews, I think the reason here that it’s more of a resale market is there’s this huge concern over some of the legality issues with off-plan developments. There’s no land on the Costa del Sol. It’s very built-up.

Unfortunately, there are certain people within town halls who have not been building stuff exactly how it should have been built and, as a consequence, a lot of people feel that it’s overdeveloped. It’s a real shame because it’s a beautiful area that has been exploited by people being greedy.

However, I think the off-plan concept works for a lot of people because they can put down a relatively low amount now, buy – with, hopefully a substantial discount – the finished product and they don’t need the property immediately. The off-plan concept still holds good but it’s like anything whether you’re buying at the top-of-the-market or you’re buying in a market that still has a long way to go.

Justin: I think there are a lot of trust issues here as well because the Costa del Sol has had a lot of bad publicity over the past few years, especially very recently. I think Polaris World, for example, tends to have quite a good reputation. I think more people may trust their money…

Mike: Polaris World contacted us four years ago and we had a meeting and they said “This is what we want to do,” and I was very, very skeptical. They were saying “We’re going to have these big resorts and we’re going to have Jack Nicklaus design our golf courses and a five-star international hotel and spas and restaurants and home delivery.” I go “Right. No one’s ever done this.” I’ve got La Manga and that’s twenty years old now.

The problem we have with the Costa del Sol is that we would take a client along. If the client said “I wish to purchase a two-bedroom apartment” and they’re looking at maybe 250,000 or 300,000 euros – the cheapest end of the market here. We would maybe get them a photo or a piece of paper. That was the marketing of the developer. You took the client along if the client was in Spain and it was generally a portacabin in a field with some flags up and the promise that hopefully, in six to eight months, they may actually do something. From our point of view, it’s been a nightmare dealing with these people.

We’ve had our fingers burned two or three times – quite a big learning curve – where people have said “We’ve got this and we’ve got that.” Before we deal with any developer, we do a lot of due diligence on the company but even some of the most reputable companies down on the Costa del Sol have had problems. Whereas if you take your client to Polaris World now and they see the infrastructure, the head office and the 200 people in the customer services, it’s a very impressive setup. Very impressive.

Justin: It sounds impressive. Let’s talk a bit more about that. To be honest, the first time I’ve heard the name Polaris World I thought it was some sort of theme park. I know it sounds a bit silly but give us a bit of an insight to what Polaris World is all about. Give us a bit of the philosophy behind Polaris World.

Mike: Now looking back on it, it’s very simple. At the time, it was huge because no one had essentially done it before. When I tried to explain it to myself, I was very, very skeptical because Costa Calida – there was nothing there – and no one had really talked on the scale of what they were looking to do. They explained it to me and they said “Look at Florida. Look at the luxury golf resort business model in Florida.” Not having had a holiday in three years, I said “Okay. This is a good opportunity,” and I went to the States.

I spent a week or ten days in Florida and I went and had a look at some of the resorts there. They were absolutely incredible. Absolutely amazing – the scale of which they were building these resorts and just the marketing and how well done is the typical American customer service.

I came back and had another meeting with Polaris World and I went through all of their stuff. It was immediately apparent that they had gone to Florida and – they will admit this – they picked up the business model in the States lock, stock and barrel and they put it down in Spain – the same service, the same project management company, the same Nicklaus design that was done a lot in Florida, they used external auditors for all their processes and they’ve taken all the American ideals for marketing and customer services. And it works very well. What’s happened is it’s changed the face of the Spanish property market. I think now, there’s probably no going back to the old style market.

By the old style, I mean that when I bought a property in Spain, I bought an apartment in a block. There were three blocks and a swimming pool and I thought it was the best thing in the whole world eight years ago. It had no underground parking, no hotel facilities, no spas, no sports facilities and such, no golf course. You didn't expect that. Now Polaris World has raised the bar and they say “Okay, it’s a gated resort.” You have an 18-hole Nicklaus golf course on 99% of the resorts. You have, on some of them, a five-star hotel. There are bars, restaurants, cafes, banks, home delivery service, babysitting services, you could log onto your own apartment’s internet, book a plane, book a rental car, stuff that other developers just don’t have the infrastructure to do.

What’s happening now is that we’re actually having people come through. Actually, on our website, we’re hearing them say “I want to buy in Polaris World.” We’ve never had that. We have people coming to us and saying “I want to buy a two-bedroom apartment in Spain,” and we say “Anywhere in particular? - No I haven’t got a clue". But know they’re actually seeing the marketing – Polaris World has spent a lot on TV marketing – and they’re actually seeing the resorts.

The Mar Menor Golf Resort was quite a big learning curve for Polaris World. Even when they built their first three or four show houses, I was still fairly skeptical. There was a huge field – a million square meters or something – with three or four brightly-colored houses and they said “There’s going to be this, there’s going to be that.” Even then, would they actually deliver?

There were a lot of other developers that were spreading rumors about Polaris World, saying that they were never going to build the golf courses and it’s all a con and blah, blah, blah. It got to a stage where it was ridiculous. You look at it and you think, “I think Jack Nicklaus is fairly well-known. I don’t know his fee but it’s reputed to be between one to two million dollars per golf course. It’s unlikely that he’s going to be involved in a property scandal.” What’s happened now is that the skeptics who, three years ago, built typical little buildings across the Costa Calida who would maybe build three or four blocks and a swimming pool are now looking and saying “They delivered what they said. That is superb.”

People are now moved away from the old-style development and are now saying “I want a golf course,” “I want a gated community.” The Costa Calida is a lot safer and a lot cleaner, generally, than the Costa del Sol or certain areas across the Costa Blanca. Security these days is important. People like the fact that it’s gated, which is nice.

Justin: Looking at the details – the resorts and stuff – on the Polaris World Spain website, it seems like Polaris World put just about anything that you could possibly need or want during your stay in your house or your apartment or whatever. I think the concept of all the properties that are around the golf course is, sometimes, that if you never play golf – the grass is so green that it’s fake…

Mike: Yeah. We had clients out last weekend and she really didn’t play golf. She said “I really can’t understand this entire thing about buying on a golf course.” I spoke to her and said “Look, we’re driving a car from the airport and I’m saying that it’s quite barren. There hasn’t been quite a lot of rain, which is high when it comes to Spain because it’s very hot and very sunny.

Consequently, it’s not the greenest, most lush place in the whole world. Twenty minutes later, she’s standing in the resort overlooking a lake, palm trees and the greens and she could say “Even if I don’t play golf, this is stunning to look at. It’s immaculate, there’s no litter, there’s no traffic, there’s quiet.” It’s a much nicer view even if you don’t play golf. It’s very nice to look at and such.

Again, this is one of the things that we were very skeptical about. If you look at Polaris World’s La Torre resorts, we would stand at the edge of the road when they were building these two or three years ago. I mentioned this in the video on Polaris World Spain’s website – they looked like they were building some concrete jungle because you’re looking at the back of a load of houses. It’s quite a long, thin resort as all the houses go around the edge of an eighteen-hole golf course. “Is this actually going to be good or not?” I wouldn’t quite know if it was such because this was the first apartment resort that they built.

When that opened a few months ago – literally the day it opened – we were allowed in there for the first time. I found my business partner and I just said “You have got to come and see this. It is absolutely stunning,” to the extent that we’ve now bought a property there and we will open a new office, as you know, in a few weeks’ time. I think the sponsor clients have been the same. A lot of people have never seen a development on this scale and so, when they look at it being constructed or if they went over in the last two years, they’d go “What if I bought this? It looks like a jungle.”

Going into the resort now, we literally have clients who are ringing us up and saying “My friend bought them up two years ago. He thought he was going to hate it. He’s just been over. He thinks it’s absolutely stunning. I want to buy one. What do I have to do?” literally to that extent. From our point of view, I’m thrilled because we would never recommend anything to a client that we wouldn’t buy ourselves. You never know. You're placing faith in the developer and you’re buying off-plan, but I would rather place my faith in the developer that’s got thousands of employees, ISO 9001-certified systems and is worth billions of euros than a tin pop builder who’s building one or two blocks and, when it’s finished, might actually not be around to sort out problems. I’m not saying Polaris World is perfect by a long way but they do seem to deliver what they say.

Justin: I was watching one of the videos on your website and I actually seemed quite interested because the La Torre resort, which was the video I was watching, looked like the sort of resort that if you could buy, for example, on the Costa del Sol, you would pay a considerable amount of money for it. When it comes to prices, the value for money of it is certainly very, very good.

Mike: Again, Polaris World has created an almost self-fulfilling prophecy. They said four or five years ago that the Costa Calida was going to be the next place in Spain. There was nothing there. There was absolutely nothing there. There was the Costa Blanca to the north and you had Costa Almeria to the south, and the only thing in the Costa Calida was the La Manga club. Outside the La Manga, there was actually nothing at all.

What they’ve done is to almost create a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s now a new airport planned for Corvera, there’s the airport of San Javier that’s doubling in size, you’ve got the new motorway structure going in – a massive investment by the Spanish government – you’ve got other developers who have now jumped on the bandwagon to a lesser degree and have built some other golf courses.

Within a twenty or thirty minute area, you know you’re going to have some nine to fifteen golf courses, luxury five-star hotels, equestrian centers, beauty spas, theatres, art galleries. For the first time this year, according to Spanish government figures, the Costa Calida has now become the most sought after place than anywhere else in Spain where people are investing in property. It’s turned from a ‘maybe this will happen’ into a ‘this is already happening.’

I think the reason for that is, as you say, when you look at what you have to pay on La Torre or any resort on the Costa Calida, it’s probably a third to a half of that on the Costa del Sol but it still delivers fantastic weather, it’s easier to get to than the Costa del Sol because you’ve got – including Alicante – three airports within the next two years, the beaches are generally cleaner and the prices are cheaper.

You don’t have to have “It’s Marbella.” Ridiculous prices, as you know, often combined with not-fantastic service. And they’re very strict on their planning. They’re not at all like Marbella – illegal planning, backhanders, etc. It’s still very Spanish, it’s very green. Some people say “It’s going to be completely built on…” I don’t know what the figure is but I was told last week by a client who’d read it on a website – an official Spanish government website – that apparently when all the resorts had been granted approval in the Costa Calida are built, only the 6% of the land will be built on. There is a lot of land there.

Justin: Okay. Well, that’s very interesting. You’re actually one of Polaris World’s top agents and you’re also a Golden Partner Agent. What do you need to do to become a Golden Partner Agent?

Mike: We’ve got a nice logo on our website and it’s quite good. To be honest, there are no set criteria at the moment. One of the mistakes that I think Polaris World made when they started, and we’ve told them that there under no uncertain terms, is that they recruited Area Sales Managers or Business Development Managers in the UK who literally went round every single state agent in the UK saying “Do you want to introduce clients to us?” For posters, they put them up on their windows and suddenly there were Polaris agents in every town and village in the UK. The problem with that is it doesn’t work, and I know that for a fact from Polaris World.

The figures just never come from doing that because you can’t be a property expert on Polaris World or in Spain if you don’t have offices in Spain, you don’t own in Spain yourself. People don’t just walk in and say “I’d like to buy that please. Here’s a hundred and fifty thousand euros.” They want questions, answers and they want a lot of trust before they’re prepared to part with their money. What Polaris World has now found is that 90% of their business is done by probably the top 10% of their agents because it’s what we do day in and day out, we’ve all bought properties there, we’ve all got offices in Spain, we’ve got investment backgrounds for a lot of us, we understand the market and we know what we’re talking about.

We’ve had instances where we’ve had clients this year that have been to property shows in the UK. They go on a Sunday afternoon, it’s raining, they talk through a couple and they say “We’re experts in this and you need this and you need that.” One chap in particular phoned through from one of our websites just to talk to me about a mortgage on his Polaris World property that he’d just reserved literally the day before at the show.

I was just chatting to him and I said “Where have you bought?” He said “XYZ Resort,” and this is Polaris World’s La Loma resort, which is completely different from their other resorts because it’s only a nine-hole golf course, no hotel, no beauty spa but it’s really aimed at sports professionals. It’s an amazing place. It’s not selling phenomenally well because it’s very different.

It’s a very contemporary property without has many facilities but it’s, as I say, aimed at getting all the sports teams, the golfers, the tennis, basketball and football players that currently use places like La Manga. Polaris World wants them training at La Loma. This guy had been sold a three-bedroom villa for 414,000 euros because he wants to rent it out and he wants it for his family and for his kids to go holiday in. I said “I’m slightly surprised because it’s twenty minutes from the coast, there’s no hotel or no spa for your wife – she said she likes beauty and pampering and stuff – it’s not really kid-friendly and, from an investment point of view, you’re renting it to golfers but golfers want to be on an eighteen-hole golf course whereas this is a practice nine-hole.

He said “Oh right. I never really thought of that.” So we had a chat and in the end, we swapped him over to a three-bedroom apartment in Mar Menor II, which is six minutes from the beach, has better facilities for the kids, an eighteen-hole golf course, a five-star hotel and a beauty spa for his wife. He also consequently saved about 85,000 euros. He was not overly happy with the agent that had sold him or reserved him the property. He got his money back; the good thing with Polaris World is they ask for a refundable reservation fee. He queried the agent and I said “To be honest, we don’t really deal a lot with Polaris World. We just do these extra if we can.”

That’s not good. That doesn’t inspire confidence at all. The guy was a busy professional, he worked for an oil company offshore and he said “I don’t have time to look around. It’s a lot of money I’m spending. I want to know I’m dealing with somebody who knows what they’re talking about.” That was a prime example of an agent who didn’t know what they were talking about. Polaris World introduced the Golden Partner thing to try to differentiate agents who actually do know what they’re talking about from the agents that don’t.

I don’t know how many Polaris agents there are but there are hundreds, probably a thousand, literally in the UK. I think about 35 agents have got Golden Partner status. My understanding is that from the first of January, they’re going to strip it down even more, which again is a good thing. They don’t need people out there who don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s a good product. It sells itself when the clients come out so our theory is that they should have fewer agents who know what they’re talking about.

Justin: Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the common questions and concerns that people have about Polaris World. One of the ones that I’ve seen sometimes is people wondering whether Polaris World is too big in terms of what they’ve taken on and the number of resorts that they have. What’s your view on that?

Mike: Compared to most Spanish developers, yes they’re very big. Compared to Bryant Homes or Lang Homes or people like this, they’re not very big in reality. We used the Spanish developers’ being small local companies building a development of three, four six or eight blocks. This is a massive company – I don’t know their worth – worth hundreds of millions or billions of euros with approximately 6,000 employees with big corporate investors as far as I’m aware. It’s not big for them.

The company I was looking at in the States, a company called WCI, they’re doing thirty-one or thirty-six resorts in Florida. Polaris World is doing six or seven. For us, it’s big. For companies in the States, it’s nothing. They’re using the same business standards, etc. I don’t think it’s too big. They’ve learned a lot. They did Mar Menor, first of all. They’ve learned from that that maybe the properties are slightly too close to the golf courses. It sounds bizarre, but you want to be front-line golf a lot of the time but not getting golf balls in your gardens. Maybe the plots were a bit too small or maybe it needs more swimming pools, etcetera.

But on the other hand, the people at Mar Menor, in utter good faith five years ago, from absolutely nothing, have done phenomenally well with the value of their property, phenomenally well. Now the resorts are much better. Every time they open a resort, it seems to be a step up in facilities, in quality, in the property and what’s offered. They seem to tailor their resorts to different price bounds as well. I honestly don’t think they’re too big. They seem to have the resources in place to cope when they said that they were going to be opening a furniture shop. Again four years ago, we had visions of a small twenty-foot shop with one person in it. We take clients around the furniture shop to the new garden centre, which is the biggest in Europe. It’s mind-blowing. For Spain, it’s incredible.

We were in the garden centre the weekend it opened. There were Spanish people turning up, going in, coming out the garden centre, all their friends are there and their friends were coming over. We could hear them saying “I’ve never seen a shop like this in Spain.” In the UK, it would still be impressive but it would be expected. In Spain, there’s nothing like it at all. I think they’re doing it very well.

Justin: How many resorts is it? Are there five or six resorts?

Mike: Well, you have Mar Menor. It depends on whether you include Mar Menor I, the original, Mar Menor II, the extension, La Torre, which is just being completed now and will be completed in the next six or eight months, Hacienda Riquelme, which will be finished next year, El Valle makes five, Terrazos de La Torre is six, and then we have Condado de Alhama, their resort of amazing proportions slightly down the coast near Mazarron.

Justin: Are they all relatively close to each other?

Mike: For all the ones I’ve stated except for Condado, yes. Polaris World is launching this new concept called Orillas del Mar Menor – the Shores of Mar Menor – which is basically the fact that you’re not buying in one resort, you’re buying a property but you’re able to use the facilities of all of the resorts. I think this has been one of the major selling points – the golf trail, the Nicklaus golf trail. I attempt to play golf – extremely badly – but I didn’t realize the pull that the Nicklaus name has. We have clients over, for example, two or three weeks ago from the States who spent 900,000 or 800,000 euros on a villa simply because it had three Nicklaus golf courses. There is nothing like that outside the US.

I’m going “Okay, it’s three Nicklaus golf courses.” He goes “No, you don’t understand. This is Jack Nicklaus.” They say “Look at La Manga. Look at the price of an equivalent property on the La Manga Club where there are three golf courses. They told me it would be 1.4 to 1.6 million euros.” They spent half of that on what are here – much more modern, much better facilities and resorts. I

Think the fact that the golf is very affordable, compared again to resorts like La Manga, it’s phenomenally cheaper than to play at their courses, and when you rent a property out, the person that rents it can buy a weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly ticket and then go and play a different resort every single day. They’re very close together. Condado is slightly further out. At the moment, it takes about forty minutes to get to. When the new motorways open, it’s going to be about twenty minutes.

Justin: With so many properties, is it a good place for investment?

Mike: Like anything, it depends when you buy it. This is, again, where we’re really strict with our investors. Last year, we didn’t do anywhere near as much business with Polaris World because they didn’t have as much to offer investors. We’re very adamant that if you are an investor and you want capital growth, you need to get in as soon as the resorts launch, when you’re at what’s called first stage prices. All too often, we have people come to us who say “I bought as an investor from XYZ Company and I now want to sell.” They bought at such a high price that there’s no profit left in it at all.

Yes, it depends on what you buy. Obviously, if you buy a villa at 800,000 euros, you might get very good capital growth but you’re not going to be able to sell it as easily because you’re selling to a much smaller segment of the market. But if you look at Condado de Alhama, you can buy a two-bedroom apartment with a fifty-meter roof terrace for 120,000 euros. It’s a field. It’s a 9,000,000 square meter field. In a few years’ time, it will have three golf courses – incredible numbers like 500-type football pitches’ worth of green area. It’s a vast resort. You can’t tell me that that’s going to be 120,000 euros. If I asked you what you would get for 120,000 euros on the Costa del Sol…

Justin: You could get a cardboard box, I think, with that sort of money.

Mike: Probably.

Justin: Apart from the actual resorts, there’s not a lot else in the area, is there?

Mike: There’s loads. The beaches are stunning. There are new shopping centers, cinemas, bowling, nine-screen multiplexes are opening up. Murcia City is a great city. There’s loads of great architecture, the old town, the cathedral, which is great for exploring. You’ve got Cartagena, which again has lots and lots of history and lots of bits and pieces of the port area. You’ve got the various national parks with mountain biking, lots of walking and lots of equestrian facilities and there’s going to be all the golf courses.

Justin: How far is it to Murcia, then?

Mike: It depends which resort you’re on. It can be anywhere from about fifteen to thirty minutes, depending which resort you’re on.

Justin: Right. You mentioned Condado earlier. Condado de Alhama, is it? Is that the name?

Mike: Yes. That’s the one.

Justin: That’s the one that had its planning permission rejected last year. Is that correct?

Mike: Correct.

Justin: A lot of people actually paid a lot of money for their properties at this point. I think there was a bit of bad business here at the time but it seems that Condado is back.

Mike: The day that we heard that there’d been a problem with the planning was not a good day. We could not understand because, again, we do due diligence with our lawyers before we recommend a resort and, as far as we’ve been told, everything in was completely legitimate. Immediately, Polaris World put out a press release saying that it had been turned down – in my understanding, illegally turned down – and that they would be appealing it. However, what they did do – and I have to say they came out smelling a bit of roses – was that every client that we dealt with who’d reserved in Condado de Alhama last year was offered either their money back or the ability to swap to an exact same property on another resort but at a 10% discount.

Clients that had spent 315,000 or 380,000 euros on a three-bedroom apartment at Condado de Alhama were suddenly having the same apartment on Mar Menor II for about 286,000 and they were all very happy. That could have been a nightmare but they dealt with it well. They said “Look, we know that this has been turned down illegally.

However, we don’t want it to be any ambiguity. We’ll take it off the market, we’ll deal with this now, we will get it approved and then, when we get it approved, we’ll continue to market it. However, we’ll give people the option to have their money back or swap and get a discount.” All but one of our clients swapped. Unfortunately, they didn’t swap because their personal situation had changed and she was quite grateful to get her money back.

Every other client swapped and was very happy. What happened now is that they said that they have their planning. The Polaris World resort there is going to create, we’ve been told, 3,000 to 3,500 jobs. The local people wanted it and the government wanted it because it was going to bring in a lot of investments in the area. One member of the Spanish socialist party didn’t want it, but Polaris World hadn’t done anything wrong. She was just, apparently, anti-developers.

Justin: I remember the original information last year. It seemed that they were building the second largest city after Murcia.

Mike: In the world?

Justin: No. [Laughter] It was supposed to be the second largest city. Well, it’s likely that it’s another city, really, because of the size of it.

Mike: Again, when they first announced it, I was like “What are they doing? It’s too big.” But if you read the brochure that they just brought out specifically on Condado de Alhama, it’s mind-blowing. We had clients out there the other week and they were out literally when this brochure came out. We were in the head office, we gave them this brochure, they had to read through it and they immediately said “We’re going to go for two- or three-bedroom properties on Mar Menor II and they swapped one for a villa on Condado.

When you read what’s going to be there, it’s difficult to even conceive how this will go. Yes, there are an awful lot of properties but the area is vast. La Torre Golf Resort is, I believe, about 1.4 million square meters. This is nine million square meters. There are 75,000 square meters of shopping, boutiques, cafes – it’s going to be bigger than La Manga. Three golf courses – that’s a huge amount of green area – these huge sports facilities and the properties and build densities are very, very low – it’s just in a very big area.

Justin: It’s an interesting product. You can’t call it ‘development,’ really, because of the volume of the project.

Mike: Yes. They’re developments within a development. At the moment, they’ve released two areas – the Jardines de Alhama – which are two- and three-bedroom apartments starting from about 119,000 for a two-bedroom or 131,000 for a three-bed. It’s not front-line golf but it’s got great facilities looking out into gardens, pools, great areas for the kids and stuff. At the end of the day, it’s a two-bedroom apartment in Spain with three golf courses for 120,000 euros.

At the other end of the scale, they’ve got Cortijos de Alhama – the villas – which start at around 595,000 up to about 1.5 million euros. What’s going to happen is that over the next two to three years, they’re going to be releasing everything in between – two-bedroom townhouses, three-bedroom townhouses. We’re pestering them now because demand is almost outstripping supply. They’ve literally sold so quickly.

Justin: When is the projected completion of all this?

Mike: The first stage, as usual, is around two years. We always say to people that you’ve got to allow for delays. You’ve got to allow three to four months for delays. For the overall resorts, I think they’re talking about five years. But one golf course will be done at a time. The developments will be done around that golf course. It's not a case that once your property is finished they will be building and driving through your garden. They do it very, very cleverly.

Justin: With so many properties, if I bought one there a couple of years ago in one of the resorts and I wanted to sell it now, am I going to find it quite difficult? There’s just so much for sale now. There’s so much off-plan for sale.

Mike: It depends on the price you paid. Again, it comes back to you. If you’re an investor and you’re buying for capital growth, you have to buy when the resort is launched. We have people on La Torre that bought at 145,000 or 150,000. They’re valuing now, for mortgage purposes, at 185,000 and 190,000. Maybe in the open market they might achieve 175,000 or 180,000 if they were to sell it. But we also have clients who didn’t buy through us who bought an off-plan investment who bought at 170,000. No agent, unfortunately, will do very good deals on commissions for clients but they have to pay fees to sell. They pay the taxes. They pay the lawyers’ fees.

If you bought it at 170,000 and they want to make a profit – there’s an expression that we and stockbrokers use – “the market doesn’t care what you paid.” It’s worth what the market says it’s worth 175,000 or 180,000 and you bought it as an investment at 170,000, then I’m sorry but you bought at the wrong time. You should’ve bought the year before or six months before at 150,000 for the same property.

Now, if you bought at the right time, you can still sell and make a good profit. If you didn’t buy at the beginning, I don’t know. People will potentially struggle. The problem is that on La Torre’s 2,000 or 2,500 properties, people’s personal circumstances change just before completion. There are people that want to offload the property because they can’t afford to complete due to marital split-ups or businesses failing or job loss something like that. It skews the market slightly.

We’ve said to our investors “If you don’t want to sell now, don’t sell. The prices now compared to what they’ll be in a year when the golf courses fully open and the hotels are built, it would be far, far better. When you look at the mortgage opportunities that are available in Spain now with interest on your mortgages, you can complete your property.” The one I’m completing is going to cost me something in the region of about 400 euros a month on an interest-only basis. If I were to rent it out for one week a month, it would pay for itself. Yes, if you buy at the right time, it’s good. If you don’t, then no, it’s not.

Justin: Okay. Well, say I’ve got 150,000 to spare. Which Polaris World resort would you recommend for holidaying purposes and for investment purposes?

Mike: It depends on what your needs are. Again, it depends on whether you’ve got kids or whether you’re retiring. 150,000, even in Costa Calida now, you’re going to get into just about Terrazos de La Torre and you’re going to get into Jardines de Alhama. If you go up slightly to 180,000 to 190,000, you’ll also get the Hacienda Riquelme, which is slightly more into the countryside, doesn’t have a hotel and has a beautiful setting with mountains and hills behind it. A lot of older people have bought there. It’s very quiet. It’s a very tranquil area. That’s great for them.

If you’ve got kids, then maybe you want to do something like Terrazas de La Torre because there are loads of facilities there, you’re only 3,000 meters from La Torre where again there are loads of facilities, you’re going to be five minutes from La Loma, the sports village, which is going to have things like a 3,000-seat basketball thing where they’re going to have big matches and those kinds of things. Real Madrid is allegedly training there. They’re going to have football academies and tennis academies for kids and loads and loads of stuff. If you’ve got children, you might want that because, again, it’s only fifteen minutes from the beach.

Justin: Right.

Mike: If you’re purely looking at investment as well, something like Terrazas de La Torre or these apartments on Jardines de Alhama.

Justin: Well, if I had 150,000 and I wanted to buy a resale now, would I be able to get something for that sort of money?

Mike: If you were the luckiest person around, probably yeah. It’s unlikely. If we had properties at 150,000, we’d already now be selling them all day long. I just paid more than that for the one I just bought in La Torre and I got a good price. You would need at least 165,000 Euros, probably, in reality.

Justin: So the bargains are the ones that are currently off-plan?

Mike: Yeah, but La Torre’s ready now. You can rent it now and get a return on your capital. You don’t have to wait for your holidays and they’re slightly bigger properties. What Polaris World is trying to do is to almost try and band into different prices. If we’re talking about apartments, at the moment you’ve got Jardines de Alhama – 120,000-ish for a two-bed – you’ve got Terrazas de La Torre at around 150,000 for a two-bed and you’ve got Mar Menor II at about 220,000 to 240,000 for a two-bed, the difference being build sizes, the finishing side and the density of the properties, basically.

Justin: Okay. Honestly, Polaris World is doing a lot at the moment. What’s their direction for the future? Do you know?

Mike: I don’t know. We’ve had meetings with them to try and find that out because you have to remember that at the end of the day, we’re all completely independent. I sit here as though I work for Polaris World. I would love other developers to come and challenge Polaris World. There are other developments out there like Ryder Golf and Corvera Golf but we take clients to these developments and they don’t buy it. No one seems to be challenging Polaris as far as marketing and facilities. I think they’ve almost got this critical mass now where they have people coming up and saying “I specifically want to buy in Polaris World.”

I don’t know. They reputedly own 35 to 40 million square meters of land in Spain. That is a vast amount of land and apparently their business plan is in the next 25 to 30 years. Next years, by my understanding, they’re launching this Polaris World Vacation Club where you give your property to them and they’ll manage all of the rentals and they’ll do all the marketing. Though it’s rumored, I know that it’s going to happen first quarter next year. A large company in the UK is going to launch Polaris World Holidays. There’s a lot of momentum now behind it.

I think that, like the owners of La Manga, they want to be around for the next twenty to thirty years building resorts, but they see their long-term income stream from the adults, from the garden centers, the furniture packs, the property management, the rentasl and all the additional services and stuff.

Justin: So you’re sticking with Polaris World, then.

Mike: We’ll work with them while they continue to deliver the products that clients want. As I said, if you had said that you’d based 90% of the time up in the Costa Calida, I would’ve thought you were mad because everyone went to Costa del Sol. We go where the clients want. At the moment, they want Polaris World. As we say, we would love for other developers to come and challenge them. For someone to catch up to Polaris World now from a standing start would be a massive feat because they’ve got so much investment and so much resource behind them.

At the moment now, they seem to be delivering what people want. People are happy with the product, it’s at a good price and there are bank guarantees. For the moment, while people want it and they’re going to build it, we’re happy to keep working with them.

Justin: Okay. Well, here’s one last final question. A lot of agents on the coast where we are, Costa del Sol, have obviously been looking at and selling property further a field outside of Spain now. Have you got any plans to promote other projects outside of Spain?

Mike: In a short answer, no. We tried last year. We dealt with a developer selling property in Bulgaria and this is a developer we’ve dealt with for four years in Spain that’s built over 8,000 properties and that’s been in business for twenty years. We knew who the owner is and we knew that they were a legitimate company. We worked with them and we marketed their properties and we sold quite a few properties last year in Bulgaria. As an honest answer, we try and do due diligence on all of these companies. It’s an absolute nightmare.

I think it’s a minefield. I think that an awful lot of people that have bought in some of these emerging markets – Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania – are going to get their fingers burnt massively. There are no bank guarantees. If the builder doesn’t deliver the product that they said, how are you going to come back to these people?

You can’t tell me that in Bulgaria, you’re going to point to a lawyer who’s going to sue a massive developer for one person in the UK and win. It’s not going to happen. Again, there are articles in the Sunday Times as we said this weekend pointing out the dubious tactics that agents use to sell these properties. We don’t want to be associated with that. We do a huge amount of work with existing clients. We do an awful lot of referrals.

It’s Tuesday afternoon and we’ve sold four properties in Polaris World this week already, all of them through referrals from existing clients. That’s how we build our business. We are offered, all day long, projects to sell. There’s Bulgaria, Turkey, Lithuania and I think the new one is Brazil. It staggers me.

I know of an agent who sold a property in Brazil this weekend. I think he’s been in business for two weeks. Now someone has entrusted their purchase in Brazil to a property expert who’s been involved in the property industry for two weeks. What experience does he have in the Brazilian market? How can you assist him with selling it? The tax laws are pointing to the lawyer. He’s looking at an easy commission on a cheap property and it’s an easy sell. But no, we don’t want to be doing that.

Justin: There are some interesting points there. Thank you very much, Mike. It’s been really, really pleasant talking to you about your business and Polaris World.

Mike: Thank you.

Well, I hope you found that Polaris World interview interesting and hopefully answered some niggling doubts you may have had.

You can ask me your own questions now.  Just fill in the form below and I'll send you a free information pack about Polaris World and then we can have a chat too.

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Best regards

Mike Knivett