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Credit crunch hits popular international property shows

A Place in the Sun Live show at Earls Court, London, in October and the same event in Manchester in April 2009 will now not take place on these dates. But the Birmingham Show next month is still going ahead.

Exhibition organisers, Brooklands Group, said the Earls Court show has been 're-scheduled' and will now take place on April 3-5th, 2009, alongside the month long Ideal Home Show. The Manchester show is postponed with no new date set.

Publishing Director Andy Bridge claimed the cancellations were not solely due to tough market conditions. He described stand bookings at the October show as 'good' but said that from a consumer point of view running two shows close together was 'difficult'.

However, A Place in the Sun Live Group Events Director, Ken Pritchard, admitted that the economic downturn has been a factor. 'We are as committed to delivering the biggest and best-attended overseas property shows in the UK and, in the current climate, believe that less may well be more,' he said.

It is currently a challenging time for exhibition organisers as consumer confidence has stalled and buyers spend more time researching property purchases on the internet, avoiding the expense of travelling to large shows.

Knights Events, organisers of Invest in Property Show, has gone into administration and ABC Audit figures from the A Place in the Sun Live in April this year showed attendance dropped nearly 24% on a year earlier.

'The co-location with the Ideal Home Show presented some logistical challenges and required a re-working of our historical and existing show calendar, but the benefits are clear. Ours is a mass-market brand and the ability to place the overseas property industry's messages before an audience of that scale is unmissable,' added Pritchard.

'For the same reason, since the scale of what we are now committed to in spring 2009 is greatly increased, we will not run our Manchester show in 2009,' he added.

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