Last Updated on February 16, 2023 by Tom Kane
If you want to be an expat in Cyprus, there is one essential thing, more than anything else, you must consider. Where are you going to live.
My book, A Pat on his Back, tells the story of our move to Cyprus from England. My wife and I moved in 2008, so we are now coming up to or 15th anniversary of moving to Cyprus. In that time, we have lived in five homes, and we are now on our way to moving for the sixth time.
The problem is, our house sale in England in 2008 was at the peak of the world economic crisis and our house lost its market value like water leaking from a sieve. It was inexorable and unavoidable. We lost such a huge chunk of cash, that in the end we hadn’t enough funds to buy the house in Cyprus we wanted. So, we lived in rented accommodation.
That’s fine so long as your landlord looks after you. We were well looked after by our first landlord, who turfed us out of his house after about a month. Read the book, it’s a good laugh if nothing else.
Our second landlord was much better, at first. But the water supply to the house was becoming a problem, as he was attempting to run the water supply to two homes via a system that was only capable of supporting one home. In the end, he refused to do anything, and we refused to pay an exorbitant amount of money for a poor-quality service.
Our third landlord was my wife’s daughter. Her home was in Larnaka district, and she and her husband worked in Limassol. The commute with two young children was a bit much for them, so they rented a house in Limassol, and we moved into their home. But in the end, as situations tend to change in an unavoidable way, my wife’s daughter wanted the house back as they were going to move back having taken a new job nearer to Larnaka.
As it happened, my stepdaughter’s next-door neighbour wanted to rent their house out because they were moving away, back to Britain. So, the fourth move was simple, just chuck our furniture over the fence!
It didn’t last long though, we ended up falling out with the landlord as they refused to do any work on the house. They said they would buy the paint for the fences, but we would have to do the painting ourselves. We handed the keys in and waved goodbye.
Move number five took us back to Paphos and into a house that we were assured would be a long-term rental. Two years later and the South African landlord decided she wanted to move to Cyprus from South Africa.
Move number six is now being arranged.
You see, dear reader, being an expat isn’t all cocktails round the pool. It also involves a lot of moving around.
Our next move may well be into an apartment we own near Paphos, which we rent out to holidaymakers.
It’s quite small, so if we can arrange an extension to the front, fences to keep Mad-Max at home and with the tacit approval of our neighbours, because here in Cyprus, you must get on with your neighbours or things may not be as rosy as you had hoped for, then we may have a solution. Otherwise, it’s looking out for house rentals. The problem there is that due to rising costs, greedy landlords and lots of other factors, rental prices have doubled and, in some cases, tripled. That’s not something many expats can afford, and we certainly can’t.
I wonder if there’s a world record for the number of house moves in a set time period.
Copyright © Tom Kane February 2023
