A Dream Too Far?

TRAVEL | BARBADOS | REAL ESTATE

How we planned our move from the UK to Barbados

Some years ago, our small family made the move from the UK to Barbados. In a four-part series, I look back at the process. Here’s how we got started.

Why build your dream close to home when you could move thousands of miles to do it, and make everything more complicated while you’re at it?

One of the first rules of self-building is to build somewhere close to home, so you can keep track of what your building contractors are doing. But did we do that? Did we heck? We were living in the UK, but we decided to build our dream property some 4,000 miles away in Barbados.

Why We Chose Barbados

There were a few reasons why Barbados made sense. My husband had always been attracted to warm climates, and at one point we’d considered moving to the Canaries. But that would have meant a language barrier for him, something that didn’t exist in English-speaking Barbados.

The climate was perfect, with an average temperature of 28 Celsius, 12 hours of sunshine a day and cool sea breezes year round. Plus, it was a great place to raise our daughter, and my mum still lived there, giving us the benefit of access to the extended family.

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Add in an old-fashioned courtesy rarely seen on the UK side of the Atlantic and we couldn’t think of a nicer location.

A Million-Dollar Budget? I Don’t Think So!

Barbados is the playground of the rich and famous, and some properties have a price tag to match. But those weren’t an option for us. It’s one of the reasons we eliminated the West Coast parish of St. James (one of 11 on the island) from our property search. All you need to know is that it boasts one of the world’s best known 7-star hotels, Sandy Lane.

We also ruled out busy St. Michael, where the island’s capital, Bridgetown is located. And we dismissed a few more parishes as being too far from the swim of things. This is relative, of course, as the island is only 166 square miles and can be circumnavigated in a few hours. But since you can still spend hours in rush hour traffic, and our daughter would be in school by the time we moved, this was a valid concern.

Finally, we narrowed our search to three parishes. There was St. George in the center of the island, which offered views of rolling fields and cool breezes, worth considering in a tropical climate. There was St. Philip, where land was cheap and plentiful and we’d be close to the airport without having to hear planes whooshing overhead.

But our favorite choice was Christ Church. This was where we had stayed on previous visits to the island. It offered a good mix of amenities, but was much less expensive than the prestigious West Coast. Our favorite beach (Oistins) and coffee bar (Cafe Italia at Quayside) were there and by car it was only 10 minutes to the airport and 20 minutes to Bridgetown.

Selecting a Real Estate Agent

There are dozens of real estate agents on the island, but we had special requirements because we were searching for property from so far away. In the end, our real estate agent chose herself, simply by dint of being responsive.

As we were to discover throughout the process, although Barbados is well served for telecommunications (and it all works, too) not everyone replies to emails. Those who didn’t were immediately crossed off our list, as that was the only cost-effective way to keep in touch from this distance.

M was a British Barbadian catering specifically for UK residents looking for property on the island. And we wouldn’t have to pay a cent till she’d found us a property. The search was on, and we eventually took a trip to the island to see the best candidates for ourselves.

Keeping Our Options Open

Although we knew we wanted to self build, we also looked at existing property. That’s because renovating an existing dwelling remained an option. In the UK, most people list their property with one agent. In Barbados, a property is listed with many, though one is usually the lead agent.

On one trip to see a former West Indies cricketer’s house (or so we suspected from the number of trophies displayed in the room) we were outnumbered by the agents. There were two people from our agent’s office and two from the lead agent’s office, making it hard to have a private chat about our opinions of the property without tripping over someone.

Land Ho!

Meanwhile, we were still looking at land. A church beat us to a plot (or lot, as it’s called in Barbados) near an old mattress factory. Then there was a tempting windswept seaside plot at Inch Marlow. Beautiful, for sure, but I knew that being that close to the beach meant huge home maintenance costs, so best avoided.

The agent for the mattress factory called us to say he had another piece of land available opposite a golf course. I groaned, but my husband was delighted, and we went to check it out.

The lot was large and in a new area with several soon-to-be-beautiful houses under construction. Next door to what we were already thinking of as “our” lot, there was a two-story apartment building in a Caribbean style, with lots of verandas overlooking the golf course and the sea.

Though we didn’t tell the agent, we kept going back to the land to assess possibilities and pitfalls. On the plus side, it was a three-minute drive to our favorite beach; a five-minute drive to the nearest shops; a seven-minute drive to the airport (we timed it) and had easy access to other parts of the island. On the minus side, it was a bit smaller than we had wanted and it was near several main roads.

Still pondering, we returned to the UK. My husband got out his spreadsheets and worked out that we could afford the land by downsizing. Then we’d worry about the actual build later. So that’s what we did. The UK property market was booming in and our four bedroom house in Nottingham sold before the ink was dry on the particulars.

In no time at all we had put in an offer for the land and had it accepted and by October the land was ours. We had found the right place to build our dream home.

© Sharon Hurley Hall

Sharon Hurley Hall is an anti-racism writer, a professional B2B writer and blogger, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast. This is a revised and updated composite version of a story originally published on Sharon’s Writing Lab.