Category Archives: Our marketing

Some editorial in French Property News

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We got featured twice in French Property News last month (February 2017).  Once in the “Ask the agent” feature and also a couple of properties in their “On the Market” page.

Click on the links to see the articles. We are in March’s issue too, but you’ll have to buy that to see the article (any good Newsagent or from their website) or wait until next month when I’ll publish it here.

In the “ask the agent” bit I think they caught me at a bit of a low moment just before it snowed in January! Now we’ve got some snow the response would be more positive !

“interest has picked up again, and the buyers in the market are serious. In fact the ratio of buyers to browsers is as good as it gets. Couple that with a willingness from the sellers to negotiate a little and the market is ticking along fine”.

ask the agent

 

on the market

 

New Alpine Property Website

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Alpine Property has recently launched v4 of the website. As usual we are keeping up with current technology and have made a website that will adapt to all the various devices that are being used nowadays. Mobile phones, tablets (big and small), laptops and massive screens too. With this milestone in mind I decided to look at our websites over the years.

To give a bit of a timescale.

  • AOL mail went online in 1993
  • Amazon in 1995
  • Hotmail in 1996
  • BBC online in 1997
  • Google in 1998
  • Facebook 2004

v1, Spring 2000 the first Alpine Property website

Built by Steve Norris (now the MD of Alpine Property) for Claudia Buttet, built and maintained with Dreamweaver. One fat finger could render the whole site useless!

2000

v2, Spring 2002

Already technology was leaving us behind so we brought in a professional database programmer and intranet master. This website was dynamically driven (Microsoft ASP), text heavy and image light. Still designed with dial-up modems in mind.

2002
v3.0, Spring 2005

We moved onto our own dedicated server, changed to PHP and designed the site with  broadband connections in mind. The same programmer did the technical stuff, the look of the site was the brainchild of Alex Lewis (our marketing man) and a big-shot in the advertising world.

2005
v3.5, Spring 2009

A mild update to the look but a massive update to the back-end, Lehman Brothers went under in September 2008 . This caused the property market to stall over the following winter. We had time on our hands so after a reappraisal of what we were doing we decided to diversify from the UK market and have everything professionally translated into French and Dutch.

2008

Winter 2012 Mobile site created

It became clear that many of our customers were accessing our website on their mobile phones. We’ve always liked to stay ahead of the game when it comes to technology so we commissioned a mobile version of our website. Designed to be super fast to cut down on roaming charges and compatible with all devices be that Apple or Android. It was very successful too. If we ever needed a low-bandwidth version of our website we’d all turn to this one!

2012

V4, Spring 2014

The way people access the web has moved on again; at is usual lightning pace! Our clients are now using mobile phones, tablets (big and small), laptops and massive screens too and the technology of websites is moving on to accommodate this. The architecture of our database has remained the same but the website needed new technology, a new programmer was brought in to apply his skills with Bootstrap to create a Responsive website. Alex Lewis came up with the base design again. In total we put 7 months work into this, exchanged over 2,000 emails, had dozens of web conferences and numerous face to face meetings, it’s also the first website we beta-tested on users before release.

New Alpine Property Website

Alpine Property in the press, winter 13/14

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Every year I do a round up of where Alpine Property has appeared in the UK press over the winter. In fact it’s mostly in the Autumn as the newspapers promote the up-coming ski season. As you can imagine this makes getting hold of snowy pictures of our chalets a challenge.

chamonix station

You’ll see that we are normally promoted as Winkworth’s Alpine arm. In general the writers like to feature the well known resorts like Chamonix but this year there has been a diversification. Some of the journalists have been actively seeking out some of the lesser known spots in the Haute Savoie.

Evening Standard August 2013

Cathy Hawker wrote this article about Les Gets for the her regular paper the London Evening Standard.  It’s promoting some of the new build projects in Les Gets.

evening standard 2013

Country Life October 2013

Some random ads for some mega chalets (one for 20m€), we sneaked one in in Combloux for 1.68m€. This did quite well for us when reposted on Facebook, the full article is here.  Country Life Oct 2013

Country Life November 2013

A classic article by one of the in-house journalists (Arabella Youens) promoting the big name ski areas across the Alps. Verbier, Couchevel, Meribel and would you believe it Morzine. How times change. 15 years ago Morzine would have been mentioned in the “undiscovered French family resorts category. Not in with the big boys! You can see the article here.

Sunday Times December 2013

A nice article by Sean Newsom featuring  one of our favourite traditional properties we have for sale in Le Biot. Some of the lesser known ski resorts in the Alps like Bernex and Samoens got a mention Sunday Times Dec 2013

Money Week December 2013 

A little snippet advertising one of most picturesque properties in Le Grand-Bornand. It’s chalet Fleur de Neige, just a short walk to the skiing and with amazing panoramic views of the whole area.

moneyweek

Sunday Times February 2014

This was one of the best articles that appeared over the winter. Written by Sean Newsom again (from http://welove2ski.com/) it was a well researched article on Morzine. I even got to be a bit cynical in it! Sunday Times article

Last years results are here:

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