Thanks for having a look at this blog. It is new but in fact it is also the continuation of a blog that was started in April 2006. Let me explain…
With my wife Anna I started a company called Caduceus Investments Ltd in 2002. Said company is an investment company investing in residential property. Unlike most Landlords we decided to manage our own property under the banner www.tworent.com and yes that is also a web site of available property. We started very, very small. And have grown at a rate of 370% per annum since then. We now number our properties in the hundreds and are planning to soon do so in the thousands.
By 2006 many of our tenants were loosing contact with us. We now have four offices and staff. So we started this blog aiming to provide communication with the tenants and prospective tenants.
It turned out as everything that we do to be a little bit more complicated. During the summer a job advert got us a little bit of bad publicity. We ended up in a lot of national newspapers and a search on Google to this day brings up about 700 listings for me. We used the blog to reply to the papers who also started to reply to what we said. We were running an on going conversation with one paper over a month. We also got mentioned by the BBC.
Add to this the type of thought process that I have. I live and breav business. Which I also like writing about. I have very strong political views on many social issues and as a Landlord make a lot of comments on what I see. And some of the things I have seen… So the blog began to develop readers who really were not interested in when the grass was going to be cut in Argyll Street. And the people living in Argyll street were really not that interested in what I had to say about immigration into Dublin.
So this is an attempt to bring some sort of order to the blog and make it relevant to the people reading it. There are now four blogs!
The original blog www.twotalk.net has moved to www.diary.twotalk.net . It has also changed in a few ways. The non relevant sections for tenants and prospective tenants have all been removed. All the other people involved in working in the company are also now making posts to it. So it has become as the new name suggests a diary of what is going on in the company. Over Christmas we are writing too all of our tenants and asking them so make their opinions known on the site, so we hope that it will start to take a more relevant life of it’s own.
Incidentally the www.twotalk.net web address will now tale you to a web site which lists all of the blogs, and any other multi media endeavours – more on that later.
So the second blog is called www.business.twotalk.net which as the name suggests is about business. Here you will find articles about the property investment business, opinions of what we think is going on. Along with book reviews of books that Mark reads and how relevant help if any they have given. A lot of people who provide services to the Investment company have made comments about how they would like to post too the blog – so we are inviting any of you to submit business articles here if you wish. A few people involved directly in the company will also be posting here.
The third blog reflects the fact that we are a property rental company as you can see from the name www.property.twotalk.net . This is going to be aimed at the prospective tenants of www.tworent.com . There will be features on property that we have available for rent, articles on what we do as a company for tenants etc. News about properties coming to and off the market and new areas that we are moving into.
The final blog is a reflection of the personality and interests of the chief writer to these blogs Business and Science Fiction. Basically it will look at two areas, where Business is portrayed in SF media and how. Or alternatively where SF portrays some aspect that is really a reflection of what is actually happening in the real world. Mark has a lot of personal friends who are into SF so hopefully you might see some other people writing here as well.
So are we becoming a media company as opposed to a rental and investment business? Who knows. We met a tenant last week who was impressed with what we were trying to do and found it refreshing even just to meet the Landlords and never mind ones that ran a blog. There is lots of hype about how it is possible to run a magazine these days through a blog site with none of the costs. So maybe we will become a multi million pound online business. Other businesses have transformed themselves into other forms of business. A living breathing company such as ours has to evolve.
So now that you have read all about the four blogs, who are Mark and Anna you are asking?
Mark and Anna Kennedy-Stewart are the dynamic and lovely couple who own and run this company. Yes it is Mark who is writing this. So let me tell you about myself first. I am Scottish, born in 1965. I am a Chartered Accountant and hold a degree in Business Organisation. I have founded two very successful businesses, one was called EVision which was in the Accounting software business before being taken over recently by another company. The current company and by far the most successful was founded with my wife Anna. I am a gadget geek and well into Science Fiction. The book and DVD collection is huge. Most of my close friends are either through SF or business. I have done a lot of travelling in the USA and Kazakhstan.
This probably explains why we have an office in Kazakhstan. Also how my wife comes from there – where I met her well over a decade ago.
Anna is the love of my life. And my partner in the company. Her background is in Marketing and she worked for the Kazakhstan national TV company before she came to the UK. While I have a holistic approach she is very focused on detail. Russian and multi lingual, that’s my wife.
Together we have a teenage daughter who works for the company most summers and is also taking after dad and studying Accounts.
I am the company Chairman and she is the Managing Director. You will find her posts in the Diary blog.
So I hope that this gives you some food for thought about what this is all about. And please either post a comment after a post or send an article for publishing to article@tworent.com
Mark.
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