Birmingham event a resounding success for exhibitors

News - Living

Tuesday, 06 October 2009 14:37

The second A Place in the Sun Live event of the year has taken place at Birmingham’s NEC and once again delivered a strong consumer audience. The three day event, from 2nd-4th October, saw one of the show’s highest ever ratio of visitors to exhibitors and confirmed the cautious optimism being felt across the industry.

Alisdair Macdonald of exhibitor Polar GM said: “This has been the most productive exhibition we have attended in the UK over the last two years. Numbers of course are down but the quality of clients now visiting is excellent and they’re generally serious buyers. We took a number of reservation deposits on the Thailand Koh Lanta project we are marketing. An extremely professional, well run, targeted exhibition.”

Andy Bridge, MD of organisers APITS Ltd, was pleased with the attendance of 3,891 visitors (excluding exhibitors and staff) and said it matched the floor plan. “You can only have as many stands at the show as the visitor footfall will satisfy,” he said. “We knew the likely audience size and designed a floor plan to reflect it. The result was that 108 exhibitors had almost 4,000 visitors to share between them and that works; it works for the audience because the show is not too big or overwhelming, it works for exhibitors because there is less competition and plenty of visitors to go round.” Exhibitor David Palmer of Perfect Getaways agreed: “As a small to medium-sized company we are extremely prudent on advertising costs. APITS Live has proved to be excellent value for money.”

The quality of visitors was key to the weekend’s success, with many exhibitors saying that the NEC audience was now better prepared and further ahead with their plans to purchase overseas. According to Pat Tan of Prudential Palms “attendance at the show exceeded our expectations and the quality of the visitors was excellent. Many were ready to buy.” TM Real Estate Group’s Jeremy Aston said: “The exhibition has been better in terms of quality of client and in numbers than we expected”, while Graham Pyle of Countryside international saw visitors of “excellent quality”.

The most popular stands were for properties in the US, Spain and Turkey.