Monday 6 August 2018

Selling the Quinta

Those who follow the blog will have noted I have not posted this year., and rarely last year too. Unfortunately I am slowing down as I age and non-farming activity has been very restricted due to lack of time to spend upon such acrivities - including writing for this blog.

When visiting our son and his family in the UK for Christmas 2017 I had a bad fall whilst walking down a steep hill (I eventually hit the ground after hopping at an increasing speed) and have not fully recovered. I am not crippled, but much less agile than before the fall.

I now need assistance with heavier tasks, so employ people as and when necessary. We could continue to do this, and are prepared to do so, but we prefer to do things ourselves. Some time ago my wife and I decided that the sensible thing to do is to offer the quinta for sale and move to somewhere with a lot less land. Our thoughts are the Azores, where I might cut back to just a garden and do some fishing in my spare time. I do intend to have some spare time. So, Old McDonald will still be in Portugal for a while yet, although we do eventually intend to end our days in Scotland.

Having had three estate agents view the place we reached the conclusion none of them knew anything about a working smallholding and we decided to advertise it through an online site. Unfortunately those I contacted are not prepared to do business with me following the EU regulations of accepting that selling a working farm is a legitimate business expense and therefore the advertising costs are VAT free if the site is based in another EU country - which they all are. They will accept the sale as a private non-business one, but that is not the case, it is the sale of a business asset.

All we can now do is to put the particulars on here and/or my website and try to draw attention to it through other advertising. Naturally I would be delighted for anyone to assist in the publicity.

As soon as we are organised I will post again with details of the sale.


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