sharmcliff.info Indipendent information about real estate Sharm el Sheikh

Where you live you want to park your car, have electricity and water, watch the telly, have security, some green and maybe a swimming pool (unless you are a dive instructor). Besides that there are also some things you don’t want. You don’t want rubbish and rats near your house or noise from the neighbours when you try to sleep. Lets look how we best act when the things we want are missing or the things we don’t want instead happen. Lets start with the basics power and water. Electricity has become more and more reliable over the years and it’s still getting better. It’s not worth having your own generator. More realistic nowadays is the power being cut because the bill wasn’t paid. Strangely enough this can happen even if YOU paid every month. If others in the same compound didn’t and the administrator decided to pay the bill partially or not at all, the electric company cuts the supply. When this happens, report it right away to the police showing them the receipts of every payment you made. Even if you were the only one that paid regularly, it’s considered a felony of the administrator not paying the whole bill. Though no immediate action is taken, you need a police report as proof if you want to take legal steps. The same story counts for the water. Look on www.sharmcliff.info for more details about the Sharm water supply. Still waiting for the green and swimming pool to be finished? Take a look at the completion dates mentioned in your contract and report any delays. No completion date mentioned? Bad luck! It is one of the essential points in a real estate contract. Take care of agents that mention dates in their nice and shiny brochure, but “forget” them in the final contract. This is a common practice even at the big and “reliable” agents. Getting along with the security or so called “bouwab” is essential. Treat them well. You can give them a small tip if they help you unload the car, usually one LE. Don’t tip things that make part of their normal job, but remember that a lot of things that we throw away can still be useful for them, for example the pair of jeans that don’t fit you anymore. Rubbish is normally collected in bins, but very often this is not provided for in a residential complex, so bags are used. This often results in rubbish falling out of the bags that are not closed, especially shopping bags mostly used by the Egyptians because it’s the cheapest solution. Strive for the introduction of a rule that permits only official and closed rubbish bags. Directly related to the rubbish are the rats. Rat poison does not help if you don’t remove the rubbish. Noise is a factor so present in Sharm that sometimes it’s just considered normal. Look at the taxi driver that honks the claxon to attract your attention. It just doesn’t come up in his mind it can be annoying. Can we blame him? He’s just doing his job. Likewise the construction workers in the apartment next to yours, using their hammers in the middle of the night to break out a wall. Make them understand you have to sleep to work tomorrow. Find out when they think to finish, but insist that noise after 11 o’clock is not accepted (in Europe normally 10 o’clock). Well, we are not in Europe, so in a certain extend we also should adapt a bit. For sure a bit of flexibility doesn’t hurt. If we want to enjoy the sun and the other advantages we have here, we should accept also some downsides.