A little background information in the form of an earlier article featured in Unique Property Bulletin…
When Will The Full Bulletin Magazine Return?
Good News: Telecommuter Freelance Writers Wanted
As of 24th March 2020, Unique Property Bulletin can advise we are now able to contract the first freelance journalists in our 33 year history to help our small group of volunteers who have been keeping this publication going since it was established on Davaar Island.
Starting at a modest £10 per hour for a few hours each week. On present form and success, the direction of travel is likely to include increased in hours if desired.
This is example unique building is real. All you need is a hillside building plot.
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Several folk have asked us when the full-format Unique Property Bulletin will return.
Here is the answer….
Hello Dear Reader,
Many thanks for the message asking if and when we are going to resume the weekly online magazine style Unique Property Bulletin. Here is our reply. It is a long letter. Primarily because this may change your life and the retiring editor here has 33 years of work to summarise in one missive. Maybe make a cup of tea and join us for ten minutes.
From 1987, we have been sending out a regular paper version of Unique Property Bulletin containing a dozen unusual sale listings, plus articles and features to all of our subscribers…
Old Style Paper Format Bulletin (1992).
Online Is Subtly Different
In 2012 we transferred the paper version of 3,500 circulation to an online equivalent. A large number of folk regularly checked the main website every week or two. The circulation grew and grew.
Old Header Style of Unique Property Bulletin Online
Including Archived Paper Versions For Reference
However, by 2016, the online version had increased circulation significantly (a good thing – and thank you to all our readers). But we were faced with an overload and burnout of our 5 volunteers. The exponential increase in readership after transferring the Bulletin to an online format went a bit viral at times. We are incredibly grateful to the current 20,000 to 70,000 folk who read Unique Property Bulletin. With thousands of folk visiting the Bulletin website, hundreds of emails arrive each day (again, a good thing, no complaints). Some articles have a reach in excess of 186,000 (eg: here). This has amazed us. However, our volunteers began to cope less well. Of all things we would wish to for: messing up someone’s purchase of their ideal home because of information-overload at this end is not something we want to end up doing.
Action had to be taken to remedy the challenges of Unique Property Bulletin being an accidental success and not having sufficient resources to manage high readership numbers effectively.
Simply illustrated, the stage had been reached where our volunteers would have…
7am – Tidy Desk…
Actual Desk of A Volunteer: Relatively Tidy!
10pm – Not so tidy…
A Full Days Work!
2am – After midnight – Falling off of the perch…
Sleeping at the computer and still 24 emails requiring a reply.
Next day, up at 7am and repeat the cycle.
We needed to take a decision…
EITHER: Close the Unique Property Bulletin completely,
OR: find a solution. An interesting one.
Consequently, the volunteers at Unique Property Bulletin have been on sabbatical. A very successful one. That included an adventure buying a lighthouse station and renovating the property. Selling a couple of the spare buildings not needed and retaining a place at a splendid unique property.
Noss Head Lighthouse Station.
Bought By Unique Property Bulletin: 23rd May 2017.
A crucial part of our plan is to rent a couple of rooms in the old Engine House offices to guarantee an income. Yes, we do secure internet-derived revenue from Google Adsense + book sales and pay-per-view articles. But that fluctuates. Providing part of someone’s income is a matter we take seriously. Hence underwriting that via our wholly-owned property portfolio.
The good folk who do join up will in turn, help our volunteers to continue this publication.
In answer to your question: YES, we shall be rebooting the Unique Property Bulletin online journal to its earlier full, weekly, online magazine format.
An example from 2012: Click here.
We chose that edition because it pictured a very ordinary desk in one of the unusual properties we featured that was for sale…
Who Might Work From A Desk Like This?
Plus a second desk in a relatively unremarkable garden office…
A Simple Garden Office
With An Extraordinary Author In Residence.
However, these two workspaces, one in the main house and another one located via a two-minute commute across the back garden lawn are extra-ordinary.
The wooden surfaces upon which someone wrote their work on the desks and space in these pictures are none other than the former magic producing literary icon, JK Rowling.
Not quite the birthplace of Harry Potter, but certainly the nursery and part of that wonderous rich journey. These photos are from JK Rowling’s Edinburgh home (here). We include them as you too may end up putting words on paper in a way that can have an amazing outcome.
JK Rowling At Work
When our Unique Property Bulletin editor founded our publication he had no idea that his capacity to mangle the English language and slaughter syntax on this very device…
Old Thunder Thumbs At The Unique Property Bulletin Keyboard
As with JK RowlingThis is also a style of magic keyboard: Secured A Large Lighthouse Station For Our Private Members’ Club.
…would lead to ourselves and our friends within the Bulletin’s private property club purchasing this huge lighthouse station with several buildings, a loch , a pier, a helicopter pad, even cliffs to build the structure at the head of this page.
So if you do end up joining us ~ telecommuting from your current covid-quarantined house, it may well transpire in due course that you will end up moving home to somewhere that you love. For example a moated castle, or water tower, perhaps even a windmill or even a private island.
Just as long as you have a broadband connection + a decent way with words + a capacity top research for unusual property for sale, an understanding of WordPress internet site operation (or ability to self-teach via Youtube) and an imagination coupled with enthusiasm.
To be clear, we are not looking to have the freelance journalism + admin., + IT contractors onsite. One of our guiding principles has been to prove that telecommuting works. So our telecommuters are more than welcome to live at a lighthouse station, or write at a windmill, perhaps even a be an author at an air control tower.
That is our primary point: as long as you have a broadband internet connection, you can work anywhere that your heart desires.
Baby steps at first. You do NOT need to worry about composing an opus dei in the style of JK Rowling. Just read several of our online editions of Unique Property Bulletin and start with fairly routine listings. Though please, no flowery estate agency jargon. We are an independent company and have no skin in the game. So an honest, kind and interesting review might be appropriate. Sometimes just a few photographs plus a very short summary and a hypertext link to the owner’s estate agent and you are completed for the day!
This contract work at Unique Property Bulletin is a reasonable way to establish if this lifestyle works for you.
It may also help reduce your cabin-fever at being quarantined in the house and with effect from 8.30 pm on 23rd March 2020, instructed to work from home by the prime minister.
We are reasonably sure that Covid-19 will run its course: that everyone will be allowed to leave their imposed confinement. At that point we would wager many, many people will be reviewing their life and how they live. The 2019-2020 pandemic will leave major scars on the psyche of the vast majority of the 8 billion residents on earth.
Another reason this page has been updated is the five volunteers here at Unique Property Bulletin havebeen flooded with enquiries from folk looking to buy nuclear bunkers and/or small islands!
So you too may wish to spend the next few weeks considering how you want yourself and your family to live. A place in the country? Maybe a remote island. Our unique property club used to own one in 1999-2000. We are looking to buy another private island in 2021 after the dust of this pandemic settles and before another virus comes along. Many folk have already endured several pandemics…
Every few years there is a particularly bad virus.
There is a reasonable worry in the next 5 to 20 years there will be another virus.
More contagious with a higher lethal percentage.
It is a reasonable philosophy to consider locating a place to live where the vicissitudes that hit the UK, Europe and the world during the end of 2019 can be a relatively benign experience than what I bet many of our readers studying this missive are experiencing. Lockdown in your house with the occasional safari to the toilet and wishing you had bought a place with an attic to explore or a bigger garden.
Well, once Covid-19 is dealt with and the Lockdown removed, how about re-evaluating your style of life and conside moving too somewhere that you can enjoy a better work-life balance and be in a better position if, or rather when MERS2 comes along with a 90% contagion rate.
If you take nothing else away from this page, please let it be that you will review where and how you live and set this against a backdrop of where you would love to live?
If you have the inclination to virtually explore other places to call home during your Covid-19 quarantine period, the brilliant thing si you can actually start working on contract and secure a very modest remuneration whilst also exploring the world and viability of telecommuting. If this really appeals, then have a look through several back issues of our online Unique Property Bulletin to see if any particular genre or style suits your new life
Returning to the publication, since purchasing the Noss Head Lighthouse Station, we have been looking for more office accommodation so that our HQ team do have a real-world location from which to operate
Noss Head Lighthouse Station. UPB-HQ
The next offices now include our new Abbey Studios purchased in March 2020. That building is being refurbished as and when the current Coronavirus Act 2020 allows (contemporary progress of the legislation: here).
Because of the worldwide pandemic, we are concentrating on our long-term advocacy of supporting and growing a telecommuter work community.
Hence this recruitment drive for folk who would like to explore the merits of working from home.
This has been a long letter, but hopefully, one that gives a helpful answer.
Kindest regards,
Russ
………..
Russ McLean, Unique Property Bulletin Ltd., Abbey Studios, 280 High Street, Arbroath, Angus, DD11 1JF.
LinkedIn: Here.
