I flew back home from England on Thursday night after a busy visit to family and friends and a vain search for a potential ‘investment property’. 

Those unfortunate enough to follow this blog on a regular basis might well recall my advice at the turn of the year to sell up and take a profit out of the Israeli property market. Well, we decided to ‘go for it’, placed our house ‘For Sale’, and concluded a deal some weeks ago. We’ve rented a house in the same area of our lovely town of Zichron and plan to re-invest the money in the British market.

‘Mmmm’, I can almost hear you thinking. The premise behind this big gamble is my belief that the local market may well be close to its peak having jumped around 50% in the four years since we made the move over here in 2007. With massive instability in the region, threats by our former partner in peace Egypt to cut off the oil supply, (or at best charge us double for the same), interest rates having risen ½% in the last couple of months with the promise, (not a threat, a promise), of a further 1% rise by the end of the year, and many people finding house prices in Israel completely beyond even hard working middle income families, I’ve taken the view that (rightly or wrongly) the market here has reached a similar position to that in which Britain found itself at the start of 2008; the beginning of the end of the good times and beyond.

It seems on paper to make perfect sense. Take your money out of a high market and place it into a low market, but as we all know, finance and economics are very complicated matters and anything could come along to throw a spanner in the works. That said, nothing I saw during my recent visit to Leeds suggested to me that the housing market in West Yorkshire is going in any direction other than down in the foreseeable future. As such, I’ve decided to bide my time a little longer and look to buy at the start of the winter when possible interest rate rises in the UK, the full force of ‘Cameron’s Cuts’ hitting home, and at a season when sellers are desperate, (knowing that few properties change hands between November and the end of March), might well play into the hands of someone like myself, keen to ‘make an offer’.

In the meantime there’s the little matter of moving house, never a pleasure wherever you live and always a daunting task. Packing boxes will arrive soon and then begins the periodic process of attempting to scale down and get rid of so many of those things that we have absolutely no use for or tuck away at the back of the wardrobe and forget we even had. The new house will have a separate studio for Paz to do all her cake baking and decorating, and a classroom for her to give her master classes in sugar sculpture and cake design. If you haven’t had a chance to see her latest works of art you can check them out at www.cakeiteasy.co.il – and she does deliver anywhere in the world! That’s my quick plug for the week, one which should keep me in her good books for a day or two.

And what significant events have been occurring here whilst I was away? Well, the usual politicking has been going on between parties, and Ehud Barak has launched his own pale shadow of a political entity called ‘Independence’. I reckon it’ll be about as popular here as a pork chop at a barmitvah!

One very exciting thing has however moved a step closer, and that is the launch of Israel’s electric car network, something that if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed. In a few months time around 50 electric stations (like a gas station, but with the obvious difference), will be fully operational and ready to charge completely electric cars the length and breadth of the nation.

The idea is that of Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi, who with the support of Israel's veteran president Shimon Peres has succeeded in overcoming the sceptics and putting in place a network of stations that can recharge Agassi’s own design of battery that sustains a charge for up to 300 miles at a time.  Agassi tried for ages to persuade major car producers around the world to produce a fully electric car that would perform the same as a petrol engine and was laughed out of town on a number of occasions. That was until he met the chairman of Renault, who it transpired had already come up with a working model but didn’t dare hope that there could be a network anywhere in the world that could make the car even remotely viable. All of a sudden these two disparate parties became a match made in heaven. Better Place, Agassi’s company, will (I believe), become something akin to Google or Microsoft as the biggest success story in the world by the year 2020.

Already Hawaii and Denmark have begun the electrification of their road systems under the guidance of Better Place and using the Better Place technology. The system is perfect for small nations, in particular those island nations with a little foresight. The costs of running the electric car are far less than a petrol engine, and a fully charged battery costs significantly less than a tank of petrol. Reviews of the performance of the new Renault Fluence have been very encouraging and the French company is so confident Israelis will be queuing up to buy their electric car that they have set up a test drive circuit on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. I’m planning to give it a whirl some time soon.

For a change the Israeli government is also jumping on the bandwagon and to its credit is reportedly knocking 90% off the purchase tax normally imposed on a petrol or diesel car in an attempt to persuade would-be buyers to purchase the all electric Renault Fluence. I believe this will be a massive success story and one that will dominate the business world for decades to come. Wouldn’t Britain also be a perfect site for this new system? 

That’s all from me for this week so ‘Shalom from Israel’.

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