One Step Closer to Moving

Rob's company is more than tripling the size of its UK operation over the course of the next few months - there are currently 11 employees and they'll be hiring 25 or so new people. Rob and his colleague Adrian are going to be responsible for managing these new recruits into the product development division, and they decided that this job would be far easier if they didn't live 250 miles apart and could actually work from the same office. So we're moving to the south coast.

We put our house on the market on 19 March and the closest we came to a viewing was someone arranging an appointment then cancelling and saying she would re-schedule, but she never did. On 19 April, 4.5 weeks after we instructed the estate agents, I decided to call them the following Monday and ask why no one had come round to view the property and if there was anything I could do to make it more saleable. Then I got a call from the agent that afternoon arranging a viewing for Sunday, which went very well. Then on Monday the agent rang to arrange another viewing for that evening, and on Tuesday morning we got a full asking price offer from the second couple!

Now all we need to do is find somewhere to live in Southampton... It's not very easy to do that, being up here, so we think we might rent somewhere for a while until we get a feel for the area. Also, we don't actually have an office down there yet - it is likely to be in Chilworth, but it's not 100% yet, so it wouldn't be wise to buy somewhere just yet, in case it turns out to be a long way from the office.

We're working towards a moving date of end of June/early July. The date for getting the new office up and running is 1 August.