About

If I was talented, then perhaps I could be described as a Renaissance Man.

But I’m not.  So I’m probably more accurately described as a jack of all trades, master of none.

I’ve been equally blessed and cursed in having a rather bizarre life, especially over the past six years when I sometimes believe that I did some strange bodyswap things with a complete madman, like in the movie Freaky Friday.  It will be spoiling the plot to tell you exactly why this is the case just yet – I will probably drop in snippets of madness throughout this blog, but let me bring you up to date with where I am currently.

So currently, after 15 years of living in Eastern Europe (Prague and Riga), I find myself living in a shotgun shack … no, that’s Talking Heads.  I find myself living in Hurghada, Egypt on the Red Sea, where the sun shines 365 days of every year as the Egyptian Tourist Board describes it.

And they’re not wrong.  It’s friggin’ hot nearly all of the time.

I arrived here almost be complete accident.  I was quite happy fiddling around with websitey type projects in Eastern Europe when it all went wrong for me and I went bankrupt.  Again.  Something I seem to be doing on quite a regular basis.

But as one door closed, another one opened. 

My previous website project was Propertastic! – a portal for anyone interested in investing in emerging markets property, mainly in Eastern Europe.  While making my research, I stumbled upon the fact that beachfront property in Egypt could be bought for as little as $30,000 back in late 2006 and so added that to the site.  It quickly became the most popular part of the site and so, in October 2007, I came over here for the first time to take a look around.  I was planning on writing a little bit of information for my website, but ended up getting a bit carried away – so carried away that I accidentally wrote a book – the snappily titled Propertastic’s Complete Guide to Hurghada Property and Egypt’s Red Sea Riviera Real Estate, which was released in December 2007.

Despite having only spent a few days researching it and a few weeks writing it, the book gave me ‘instant property guru’ status and a lot of people started asking me to help them find property over here.  With my life collapsing around my ears back in Riga, I realized that the only way of making an honest living was to move over here and so it properly, so that’s exactly what I did at the end of January 2008.

So that’s me – the Accidental Realtor.  Fortunately I met up with an excellent partner in Peter Mitry who has patiently taught me the difference between my arse and my elbow in this business and our company, Egypt Real, is doing pretty well these days.

When I am not busy trying to sell property, I am usually trying to entertain my girlfriend, Liene, who came over from Latvia with me.

I am a fair bit older than I look, and a LOT older than I act. 

That’s enough about me for now.  You’ll learn a lot more about me from my posts (if I can find the time to make any, that is).