“A trip to Birmingham was a one-stop shop for our new home in Spain.”
Kate and Andy Cave from Devizes in Wiltshire had talked about buying a home in Spain for around a decade. But as time pushed on, an inheritance came their way, and Andy started putting in a few less hours at work, they decided to start looking.
“My grandparents and my brother live in Spain so we knew it well and that we wanted to buy a villa there,” says Kate, 47, a sales manager for AstraZeneca. “We watched endless episodes of A Place in the Sun and did some online research and decided that the southern Costa Blanca would be ideal. We didn’t want to be right on the coast but not too rural either – but close to an airport.”
The couple, who have children of 15 and 18, headed to the A Place in the Sun Live exhibition at Birmingham’s NEC last year. “We knew we wanted a three-bedroom villa with a pool for a budget of around £300,000 and that we’d pay cash,” says Kate.
At the September show they made the most of their time by talking to a lot of exhibitors and by listening to a couple of the seminars. They ended up at the stand of MASA International where they started sharing their thoughts about Benijofar - one of the locations on their list – with Kerry Dixon, who happened to live there.
Benijofar is a small Spanish town in the province of Alicante, half an hour from the airport and 15 minutes from the coast. Convinced it might be right for them, they flew out in January to meet Kerry and they whizzed around a few properties. “We liked the mix of Spanish and British there – not wanting an overtly traditional place where no English is spoken at all, but equally not somewhere that is too Brit-centric,” says Kate.
They found a three-bed villa with a pool on a small urbanisation between the more touristy area of Quesada and Benijofar. “It feels like the best of both worlds,” she adds.
It won’t be ready until October but they are staying on the complex in July to organise a few things prior to completion, though she says Kerry has been super helpful with the admin such as sorting out an NIE number.
When they do go there, their days will be spent playing golf (Andy) and ‘quite a lot of eating and drinking’ and relaxing around the pool (Kate).
One day they might spend longer out there – Kate’s applying for an Irish passport thanks to her family heritage – but until then they will go out for a lot of long weekends.
Going to the exhibition was a great way to kick-start their search, she says. “Not only did we meet MASA but we met lawyers, tax experts and also signed up with A Place in the Sun Currency to be ready for transferring funds. It was a great one-stop shop – in the end things came together quite quickly!”
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