Foreign Perspectives

The housing sales market has been very slow in France during 2006 which we’ve noticed through the large drop in house buyers staying with us during the year.However, it does seem to be picking up fast as we’ve had quite a flurry of house hunters staying with us recently and bookings into the new year for house buyers are well up on what they were over the same period last year. That in turn appears to be taking the prices being asked for up too so if you’re planning on buying somewhere over here it might be as well to get moving on that idea sooner rather than later.One of the best ways to get a feel for the market here is via the major property exhibitions in London. The best one is Vive la France which is a combined French property and culture exhibition held each January. If you miss that one, the next best is the French Property Exhibition in early September which is basically Vive la France without the cultural section. There are regional versions of both of these but it’s usually best to get to the London one if you can as the exhibition there is on a much larger scale than the others.

In both cases, you should go on the first day of the exhibition because it’s quieter and the exhibitors aren’t nearly so exhausted. As 90% or more of the people going to these things are just window shopping with no real intention to buy, it’s important to separate yourself from them in some way. In our case, we took along a short specification of the type of place and sort of area that we were looking for and made it clear that we were returning to France 2 or 3 weeks after the exhibition on a buying trip.

I thoroughly recommend writing a little specification of what you’re looking for as both exhibitions are enormous and you’ll need to be quite clear in your mind what you want. With our little specification we were able to go through the list of exhibitors and rule out all those that weren’t of interest in about 10 minutes. You really need to be ruthless doing this as even with that we spent over five exhausting hours going round those that remained on the list!

Rather than picking out specific houses at the exhibition, it’s best to pick out agents working in the areas you’re interested with the type of properties that you want. The reason for this is that a lot of the houses listed sell very quickly indeed. In our own case, we had picked out about 20 properties to look at yet all but one were sold by the time we went to look at them just three weeks later.

Use the Internet in your searches too. Sometimes excellent properties are poorly listed so you can sometimes pick out a bargain if you research the area. For example, searches looking for “house for sale in the pyrenees” may not pick out “house for sale in maury” or even “house for sale near perpignan” when you might assume that it would. Use synonyms too eg “house for sale”, “property for sale”, “farmhouse for sale”, etc. Searches in French will usually turn up a completely different set of properties (often at lower prices) eg “maison a vendre pres de perpignan” usually won’t give you the same list as “house for sale near perpignan”. Search for agents too (“agence immobliere”) as often their property pages aren’t properly indexed on google. Don’t just google either as often yahoo.com and search.msn.com turn up quite different results.

If you are hoping to buy in France, the best times are out of season as that will give you a better impression of what the villages and towns are really like. There’s normally a flurry of house hunters around just after the two property exhibitions mentioned above but any time from mid-September to mid-June is excellent (avoiding the Christmas, New Year and Easter breaks) and will give you low flight and hotel prices too.