Holiday homes and lets on the Elche coast

Who this is for

• Owners of a second home used for part of the year and shut for the rest.
• Landlords with a long-term tenant and a changeover to manage.
• Short-let hosts dealing with guests who arrive at midnight and cannot get in.
• Property managers and agents running a portfolio across the coast.
• Key holders — the neighbour or friend who gets the phone call and has no idea who to ring.

Why the coast here generates this work

The numbers are not subtle. Los Arenales del Sol is a town of about 1.3 square kilometres whose registered population has quadrupled since the mid-1990s, with a floating population that dwarfs it in summer and roughly a fifth of residents foreign, many of them retired. Just across the boundary in Santa Pola, Gran Alacant holds around ten thousand residents — the large majority foreign and mostly British — which is a third of that entire municipality. Santa Pola itself has around thirty thousand residents and comfortably triples in the season.

That is a very large number of properties standing empty for long stretches, with keys held by people who are not the owner, in a strip of coast where the physical conditions are unusually hard on locks.

What actually goes wrong in an empty property

Not much, and then all at once. A cylinder that nobody turns for six months stiffens. Elche has more than nine kilometres of sandy coast and the dune systems at El Carabassí and Arenales sit directly against the housing, so fine sand gets into sliding door tracks continuously whether anyone is there or not. The Salinas de Santa Pola natural park spreads 2,469 hectares of working salt pans and saltmarsh across the Elche and Santa Pola municipalities, which is why the air along that strip is genuinely saline rather than poetically so.

Then somebody arrives in July, forces a key that was already telling them something, and snaps it inside the cylinder on the first evening of their holiday.

The visit before the season

The cheapest job on this page. While the property is empty and nobody is waiting on the doorstep, we check the doors and the locks, free what is stiffening, adjust what has dropped, and tell you what is likely to fail. It is a fraction of what the same fault costs as an out-of-hours call-out with guests standing outside.

Changeovers and keys

The rule we would give an owner is simple: change the cylinder when a key is unaccounted for, and do not bother changing it when it is not. A long-term tenant leaving is a change. A key that did not come back is a change. A key with the address on the fob is a change, immediately. Routine changes between every short stay are usually money spent on the appearance of security.

Working with you from somewhere else

Most of these jobs never involve the owner being present. You describe the problem, we agree the price, we attend with whoever holds the key, and you get photographs of the door before and after along with an itemised factura by email. If the work is going through an insurer, that invoice is written the way a Spanish insurer expects to read it.