With a challenging set of UK economic conditions, it might be thought that the role of commercial estate agents has diminished somewhat. This article intends to identify what role these agencies are playing in the rebirth of the good old days. That rebirth seem a good distance off, but the green shoots have to start somewhere, so do commercial estate agents have a key role to play?
As you may well know, these estate agents organise the rental of innumerable business and industrial properties. It is true that many of these agents are finding it difficult to rent out properties, which means that those looking to rent can find some really good terms for rental. These tough environments tend, it might be argued, to sort out the mediocre commercial estate agents from the really good ones.
London itself appears to be very busy, even during this recession. The streets of the centre are full of people – and this includes many tourists who are willing to spend money. As this is the case, there is very little vacant space in this area.
Commercial estate agents that deal with central London properties are finding that business is a lot brisker than other geographical areas of the UK. As well as being a tourist hot spot, London boasts a great many governmental and corporate organisations; the people who work in these organisations help to boost the local economies a great deal.
With that in mind, many other parts of the UK do not possess this kind of advantage – and so when we look at periphery areas of London, and those in Scotland, Wales etc., we find that commercial estate agents are finding business a little tougher. There are a great many councils keen to fill the many town centre properties. The big favourites are charities, but also we can find art related uses of the space.
The challenge then for commercial estate agents in London and indeed across the UK, is to find people to fill these spaces – even if it is just a temporary fix for reduced rents. Estate agents such as these, one could say, have a responsibility and indeed a power to assist in regenerating our forlorn looking British high streets.
One thing is certain, a positive attitude is required to ensure that properties are found a use wherever possible. The UK is built on small towns, and those towns need their high streets to be vibrant – stimulating commerce and culture.
Gino Hitshopi is highly experienced in the realm of commercial estate agents, having written about the property industry for many years. For more information please visit: http://www.thelorenzconsultancy.co.uk/
In the past twoweeks we’ve had our closest Showdown, and our most-voted Showdown ever. So we’re a little hesitant to make any predictions about what this week will deliver… We’ve decided that it’s another of our all-time most popular themes – Gazette – that’ll serve as the canvas on which today’s battle will take place.
The two amazing modifications that’ll be squaring off against each other this week are the colourful SARocks (created by WooThemes co-founder, Mark Forrester) and the sophisticated and awesome, Quarterback Records. Since we’re fair and all, it’ll be Quarterback Records that’s up first…
Quarterback Records – Link (Micheal Sloane & Taylor Trask from Strategic Blend)
Quarterback Records
This is the second modification by the Strategic Blend crew that has been featured in the Showdown series, after they lost out in the very first week with their? “The Station” modification. So hopefully they can give SARocks a run for their money this week again…
Quarterback Records is not your run-of-the-mill record label for hire. Abandoning the notion that one size fits all, Quarterback Records forges partnerships with artists to determine their ideal needs, and the most beneficial way to allocate resources to achieve high marks.
With a warm colour palette of yellows and oranges the site automatically reflects its hot, up and coming artists. With well designed graphics in both the home page featured slideshow and in the sidebar advertising banners, the site comes across very professional, important in wooing new artists.
The background image of? a watermarked sketch of what resembles an American football coach’s handbook perhaps is reflective of its strategic approach at marketing its artists, it can however be misinterpreted and give off the impression that the site is sports related.
On the single post pages a calm, soothing creme colour is used as the background color of? the content block with a serif font type chosen for the blog content, giving it a more corporate feel.
The site has not been customized with regards to its functionality, nor has any of it been moved to other places, but its styling alone gives it a unique look and feel.
A quick note before reviewing the SA Rocks design – We certainly don’t want to come across as biased and say how awesome this design is as it has been designed by one of our co-founders. The site is run by Nic Haralambous, and fueled by his passion for South Africa. Any winnings will most certainly go to Nic.
SA Rocks is not a website dedicated to blindly praising South Africa. I understand that every country has flaws and I do not deny the flaws of South Africa. I do feel that there are enough people who berate our country and it’s time for people to start acting and thinking positively about South Africa.
When designing SA Rocks Mark wanted to adapt the rather corporate looking Gazette theme into a more vibrant, colourful one, reflective of South Africa, otherwise known as the rainbow nation.
A custom logo design with a hint of Superman powers comically showcases the good work Nic is doing for South Africans. With a radiant glow around the logo it pulls the eye further down the page into the content area. Immediately you will see the page navigation and category navigation one below each other, instead of either side of the logo and the default right sidebar has been moved to the left, an easy customization to make. By making these small changes it gives the Gazette theme quite a unique feel.
There is a prominent email subscription form in the right of the header space which encourages users to sign up for regular news updates.
The blog post boxes on the home page are neatly displayed using clean typography and a pale yellow background colouring. With some non-obtrusive Google ads in the single posts and a few tweaks to the post meta data the site has a nice magazine feel to it.
The sidebar tabber has been styled in blue and green, together with the rest of the colours in the design you’ll start to see the colour palette reflecting the colours of the South African flag.
All that is left for you this week, is to cast your vote below and leave some of your thoughts behind the comments. Go!
Winner! Yeah, another awesome Showdown this week and Quarterback is the deserved winners with 62% of the votes. Thanks again to all who has voted, congrats to Quarterback and we’ll be back with a new Showdown in two weeks’ time (we’re taking a bit of a break next week).
1. Be flexible. Alternate either the airport/city or the time/date you plan to travel. A rigid travel schedule is going to make it hard to save money on travel.
2. Ask for discounts or upgrades. Don’t accept the hotel rate as written in stone. Often all that is required is simply to ask for a discount or ask to be upgraded to a better room. Same goes for the airplane, ask for an upgrade. If you don’t ask you’ll never know what you might have been able to get.
3. Remember your AAA card and always ask if there is a discount.
4. Plan your vacation in the off season. For example, if you want to go on a ski trip, plan one for the summer. You will find the resorts charging quite a bit less, and it will be less crowded.
5. When purchasing your airline tickets, don’t only look for round-trip tickets but also check the one-way fares. Even if you have to travel on different airlines, use whatever means possible to get the best deal.
6. If you are going to a theme park and planning to be there for more than a few days, opt for an annual pass as it usually only costs about the equivalent of two days’ worth of tickets. This will allow you to not only save cash but also to relax and not feel that you need to spend all day at the park to get your money’s worth.
7. Take a shuttle from the airport to your hotel if possible. It may take a bit longer to get to your hotel and you’ll be sharing with other travelers, but it’s kind of fun and you may make a friend of two. It’s also much cheaper than a taxi.
8. When traveling on the interstate and looking for a place to stay overnight, steer clear of the new franchise hotels if you want to save. Instead, try the mom-and-pop hotels on the old highways near the interstate that the interstate replaced years ago, or even a bed and breakfast.
9. If visiting a water park, check on their “twilight” pricing. Usually if you go later in the day you save a substantial amount off the entrance fee.
10. Consider vacation packages. All-inclusive deals that bundle air, hotel, and entertainment are often cheaper than buying everything separately. These are sometimes outstanding values for the money.
11. Sign up for email alerts from the online travel agencies. These will let you know when airfare falls below a certain point so you can quickly jump on the deal and secure your tickets.
12. Book early or book late. If you aren’t able to book your airfare tickets well in advance, you might score a great deal by waiting till the very last minute. Since airlines want to fill all their seats, they will oftentimes discount heavily at the last minute just to get those seats filled.
13. Have a “staycation.” Stay home and save money on hotel, airfare, and car rental, and enjoy the touristy places in your area that you never have time to explore normally. You’ll be surprised what’s in your own backyard.
The cost of home health care varies across states and within states. In addition, costs will fluctuate depending on the type of health care professional required. Home care services can be paid for directly by the patient and his or her family members, or through a variety of public and private sources. Sources for home health care funding include Medicare, Medicaid, the Older Americans Act, the Veterans’ Administration, and private insurance. Medicare is the largest single payer of home care services. The Medicare program will pay for home health care if all of the following conditions are met: • The patient must be homebound and under a doctor’s care; • The patient must need skilled nursing care, or occupational, physical, or speech therapy, on at least an intermittent basis (that is, regularly but not continuously) • The services provided must be under a doctor’s supervision and performed as part of a home health care plan written specifically for that patient • The patient must be eligible for the Medicare program and the services ordered must be “medically reasonable and necessary” • The home health care agency providing the services must be certified by the Medicare program.
WHAT SERVICES DO YOU NEED
Home care services can enhance your health and quality of life by helping you maintain your independence. The type of home care service you may need depends on factors such as your mental and physical health, what kind of support you have from family or friends, and whether you live in your own home or in a facility that provides some types of assistance. Home care services can range from help with chores to professional health care and rehabilitation.
Valentines Day flowers are not just for lovers – they are for friends as well. What better way to show your friend that you care about them than by sending them a Valentine’s Day flower delivery?
When you are choosing Valentine’s Day flowers for your friend, keep in mind that yellow is the color that signifies friendship in the flower world. Of course, if you are like most people, you love your best friend as well as like them. You can also toss in a few red flowers into the mix.
The best types of flowers to send to your best friend on Valentine’s Day are bouquets of different blooms. If you are in the habit of only sending roses and do not know much about other types of flowers, you can see what they look like when you shop for flowers online. By going online for a flower delivery, you can pick the perfect flower arrangement or bouquet for your best friend and actually see the selection. This far outweighs any other way of buying flowers.
Some of the nicest flowers that are perfect for your best friend include daffodils and lilies. Both of these are an opening flower bloom and can make for a very full bouquet. Lilies come in several different shades, including white and daffodils are yellow.
If you want to stick with roses for your best friend, why not send a cheery bouquet that is made up of red, orange and yellow roses? This not only tells your best friend that you care about them very much, but it can also be a real pick me up for them when they receive this sunny type of floral arrangement. Red orange and yellow are very bright and are the perfect way to show your best friend that you are thinking about them this Valentine’s Day.
You will have many choices when it comes to a Valentine’s Day flower delivery when you go online, especially if you order your flowers in plenty of time for the big day. You can peruse the website and shop by flower color, flower type, arrangement type and even occasion flowers.
If you are fortunate enough to have a best friend, you will want to show them that you care about them and there is no better day to do so than on Valentine’s Day. This year, make sure that you include your best friend when you arrange for your Valentine’s Day flower delivery plans.
Buying flowers online has never been this easy! Get more free information by going to this website Discount Flower Delivery Seattle.
What’s the Difference Between Van and Car Insurance?
Author: MarkeD
When it comes to auto insurance, many companies are starting to advertise separate policies for vans and cars. Surprisingly, van insurance differs quite significantly to car insurance despite the similarities in vehicles, and when searching for insurance it is important to be aware of the differences between the two.
There are typically three types of van insurance to choose from, ranging from third party, third party fire and theft, and fully comprehensive. Third party covers you if another party makes a claim against you after an accident and is the cheapest form of insurance. Subsequently, third party fire and theft covers the above, as well as if your van is damaged by fire or stolen. Fully comprehensive, expectedly, covers you for everything else also, including if you have a collision with a driver who has no insurance at all.
It is widely acknowledged that many vehicles can quite easily seem to be classified as either a van or a car, therefore to be sure that your van fits into the category of ‘van insurance’ there are many things to consider. Firstly, a van is a true “van” if it carries less than four people including the driver. Also, according to its specification, a van must be designed to carry goods, and must also weigh under three and a half tonnes.
It is also common for most insurance companies to refuse van insurance to drivers who are under the age of 21, this is simply due to the higher risk of crashing attributed to younger drivers. Most companies do not include cover of tools and other accessories that may be stolen from a van. It is advised, therefore, that drivers take out an additional policy to cover any items that are frequently left in their vehicle.
When buying van or car insurance it is also important to be aware of the need to declare exactly how you are going to use it and for how long for. Usually, vans that are going to be driven full time will mean a higher insurance premium. Also, van insurers today are more and more likely to give you a better deal if you are prepared to install additional safety or security devices. Adding such accessories lessen the chance that you should need to make a claim, and thus should save you money and make the inconvenience less likely to happen in the first place.
–
Buy cheap car insurance from Post Office? where we search from a panel of leading insurers to bring you the best car insurance quotes and car insurance options, for all your auto insurance needs.
The inhabited world seems to peter out at Noordhoek Beach, a five-mile strip of white sand bordered by verdant cliffs, on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula 15 miles southwest of Cape Town. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, with a pale sun shining weakly through an overcast sky, a friend and I followed a trail on horseback through dunes and wetlands leading to the coast. A long-billed Hadeda ibis and a pair of Egyptian geese waded in a freshwater stream swollen with recent rains.
The horses broke into a trot, then a canter, as we hit the beach speckled with gnarled driftwood and great, squiggly strands of kelp. In the distance, a near-perpendicular cliff face soared high above the sea, its striated green flank cut by the fabled Chapman’s Peak Drive, one of the world’s most heart-stopping stretches of asphalt. The air was thick with seagulls, cormorants and black oystercatchers. We watched a huge seagull soar high in the air, a clam in its beak, and drop its prize on the sand; two dozen attempts later, it succeeded in breaking open the shell, and ripped into the clam’s flesh.
Farther on, I caught sight of a dark form moving in the sand; it was an injured seal in its death throes. “They wash up all the time,” our guide, Hope Flex, told us. “Nothing can be done for them.” The creature wagged its flippers, lay still, then lifted its head and flopped down again. I turned my horse away and continued down the beach.
There’s wildness to Cape Town — the big skies , the rugged canyons, the jagged outcroppings of sandstone and granite that rise over the icy South Atlantic at the tip of Africa. Penguins waddle across white-sand beaches, elands roam the dunes, hungry baboons swoop down from their shrinking forest habitat on unsuspecting suburbanites, ripping apart their cupboards and closets in a desperate search for sustenance.
Part Alaska, part Big Sur, but always African, Cape Town can overwhelm a visitor with its grand-scale landscapes and its feeling of remoteness. It’s an agoraphobic’s nightmare, this patch of wind-whipped scrubland and mountain at the bottom of the world, and a naturalist’s dream.
But there’s another side of Cape Town as well: the Dutch colonists who settled in the Constantia Valley 350 years ago were determined to tame nature, and they covered the fertile, sun-drenched basin with vineyards that still produce some of the world’s finest wines.
Beach communities like Kalk Bay, reminiscent of Massachusetts — a funky mix of tidy Edgartown and rough-edged New Bedford — hug the coast. Then there’s the urban poverty that most tourists, and most white Capetonians, seldom see, except when they pass by it on the way to and from Cape Town International Airport: the squatter camps of the Cape Flats, where tens of thousands of immigrants from impoverished rural areas dwell in shacks beside canals overflowing with raw sewage, and makeshift bars, or shabeens, fill with the alcoholic and the unemployed.
The city’s collisions of culture, class and geography can be both exhilarating and unsettling. What’s more, it’s all become very cheap to experience. The ouster of President Thabo Mbeki last September, along with continuing trouble in neighboring Zimbabwe and the worldwide economic crisis have pushed the South African rand to its lowest level in five years. The rate of exchange was 7 rand to the dollar when I left in March 2007; these days it’s around 10.
Even though high South African inflation has pushed up prices in rand, they have declined in dollars. A night in a double superior room in the summer high season at the Constantia, a boutique hotel in the Constantia Valley, for example, has risen in the past year from 3,100 rand to 3,400 rand, but in dollars it has declined from about $400 to $345.
It’s now possible to stay in a cheaper but still very good hotel room, rent a car, eat a couple of excellent meals and hike or mountain bike in the world’s most magnificent wilderness reserves, all for a total of $300 a day. For the budget-conscious outdoor-loving American traveler looking for a bargain in the recessionary era, Cape Town is hard to beat.
I arrived in Cape Town in mid-November, at the start of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, and decided to splurge for the first two nights of my stay at the Constantia, on Cape Town’s historic wine route. Elegantly furnished suites laid out around lawns and bamboo gardens, breakfast on a patio facing the rugged Steenberg Mountains, a private mini-swimming pool in the tiled courtyard outside every room — it was easy to feel guilty about such shameless self indulgence, but I was paying only the equivalent of $250 a night at a temporary discounted rate, so I didn’t dwell on it. The Constantia was a luxurious and well-situated base from which to rediscover the city.
, the rugged canyons, the jagged outcroppings of sandstone and granite that rise over the icy South Atlantic at the tip of Africa. Penguins waddle across white-sand beaches, elands roam the dunes, hungry baboons swoop down from their shrinking forest habitat on unsuspecting suburbanites, ripping apart their cupboards and closets in a desperate search for sustenance.