Originally Posted by crookesey

I have been using an owners selling direct site in order to locate properties in our favoured area of the Costa Blanca. I saw a very nice village house with lots of outside space at a price well within our budget. I emailed the owners and received a phone call that very evening extolling the virtues of their property and of the village that it is situated in. The owners continued to keep in contact via email and we were really looking forward to viewing it during our forthcoming trip.

I started to do a bit of internet research on the village and found it to be not far above sea level. Having experienced the two days of torrential rain last October that caused terrible flooding and severe damage to property, vehicles and the general infrastructure of the area I decided to dig a little deeper.

I found some nice photos of the village church and square and ten stumbled onto a Youtube video of the village during last October's bad weather, it looked similar to Boscastle on a bad day. I emailed the owners and asked them how their property had stood up to the weather but to date have not received a reply.

The morale of the story is that there is a hell of a lot of research that can be done on the internet prior to wasing your time travelling to view a property that is clearly on sale to relieve the owners of a liability. So it's back to the original strategy of buying something on higher ground with very little chance of floods, and we will get our sea view.