ADRIAN SIMPSON - MONTENEGRO
But, back then I didn’t know this and during the next seven days we saw a lot of houses, some piles of rubble and some pieces of land that agents assured us would be worth several million this time tomorrow. I have never been in such a frantic,
frenzied, maniacal situation and probably never will be again. Overseas buyers would pile into agencies clamoring to buy things not yet on the market, owners would increase prices almost daily and you quickly learned not to mention a certain house to anybody in a bar because people would instantly get up and go and fi nd it. It’s hard not to over-emphasise just how
Top to bottom Small islands in Bay of Kotor. View of Kotor Old Town from Lovcen Mountain
bonkers it was; nothing in that country had been selling for over two decades because of the Balkan confl ict and now buyers wanting a bargain and owners suddenly aware they could be sitting on a pile of cash, both sought to beat the situation up into almost cinematic proportions. It was Gold Rush Fever all over again, and everybody bought into it. We managed to dodge the hysteria and
do what we’d always done and went for the house that many people had seen but not really got. It was a three-room apartment sat on
an old workshop, which had been built 25 years previously but never fi nished in a tiny hamlet above the fi shing village of Djenovici. T e price was €50,000. In fact as soon as I saw it I knew Amy
would love it because it had the sea view, just the right amount of land and had great potential that nobody else had seen, and she did. It was her that made the off er and both of us were so excited by it we returned that evening in the pitch dark with Kit and were promptly welcomed by the rest of the villagers who have since become our life-long friends. As we stood on the half-fi nished
concrete balcony of our prospective home and looked out onto the moonlit Bay of Kotor, with the twinkling lights of the Lustica Peninsula opposite, we both knew it was the start of something really… diff erent. We had a grandstand view of the bay, could walk to the beach and bars and
were only a short drive to the airport. T e purchase process was reasonably
straightforward with a contract and pre-contract to sign and aſt er paying a local solicitor a hideously over-infl ated sum to make the whole thing work it was ours within 30 days. We kept our London property and rented
it out which in turn gave us extra money to live on whilst we worked on the house. Aſt er fi nishing off our last project in South
London and then telling my TV agent I was moving to the Balkans, I bought an old Jeep, fi lled it with our stuff , and drove to Montenegro with my then 74-year-old dad, Alister. He has been part of all of our property projects and this was one he really didn’t want to miss out on. We arrived on October 4th 2006 and I
then had three weeks before Amy and our daughter Kit arrived to get things kick- started. We rented a small fl at above a cobbled square overlooking the harbour in Herceg Novi and parked the car in a disused building site behind it. I did a lot of groundwork - meeting
architects, builders and solicitors to try and work out what we could do with the house and who could help us. Most of the time there English was good enough for us to get by but I was learning more Serbian by the day. I rode my bicycle to all the builders’ merchants, plumbers shops and tiling centres to work out prices for what we needed. It was the beginning of one of the toughest
periods I will ever experience. Being at the mercy of other people’s whims and interests, in a country where you understand very little and fi nd it even harder to get your point across could be mind-bendingly frustrating. We opted for a builder who, unbeknownst
to us, had a serious drink problem and managing him became a full-time damage limitation exercise. We faced huge daily issues managing the reconstruction and much of that was to do with shoddy work, which then involved site meetings at which I would I have to shout at the workers in order to get my point across – by that point my Serbian had become OK - and I understood a
As we stood on the half- fi nished concrete balcony of our prospective home and looked out onto the moonlit Bay of Kotor, with the twinkling lights of the Lustica Peninsula opposite, we both knew it was the start of something really... diff erent.
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