Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Buying a house in France’ Category

At the start of the month it’s the French that generally fill the hotels up with their reveillon celebrations. Prices for these can reach as high as EUR 80 for very modest affairs which is mainly down to the French not trusting places with lower prices to do a réveillon meal.The following week, it’s the turn of the Spanish with their Day of the Kings holiday, the equivalent of Christmas for everyone else. In Spain, there are celebrations all over the country and on the day itself (January 6th) Spain is closed so there is quite an influx of Spanish shoppers in France which reverses the normal traffic.

And then usually it’s all quiet until March which makes this period one of the best for house hunters in France.

House hunters in France have been rather thin on the ground over the last year but the numbers seem to be going up with a vengeance as we move into 2007 for a combination of reasons.

Adding to the existing four daily flights from Paris to Perpignan by AirFrance and the Ryanair flight from Stansted, over the last year both FlyBE and BMIBaby have started flying from Birmingham, Manchester and Southampton daily which has obviously increased the number of prospective house hunters considerably and indeed one Cornish couple have just left us after an initial scouting trip and they expect to be back later on in the year for a full scale house hunting visit. Not only that but the Paris to Barcelona highway had the final bottleneck eliminated with the completion of the bridge at Millau just over a year ago and work is progressing quickly on the improvements to the train lines to allow full speed TGV access to Perpignan. So it’s considerably more accessible than it has been but if you’re considering a house hunting trip, do it soon as the prices, whilst still fairly low, are starting to catch up with other more accessible parts of southern France.

Aside from the cheap flights and accommodation at this time of year for house hunters it’s almost perfect because the villages and towns are at their normal level of activity. In many cases, people buy property in coastal resorts or even some cute inland villages having only seen them in the Summer and find that what seemed like a perfect location is almost completely dead even just a little out of season never mind in the Autumn or Winter. Not a problem if you’re only looking for a Summer house in France but many people buy places with a view to retiring here in due course.

So check out the house hunting in January: definitely amongst the best times of the year to see the place as it really is most of the year.

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

We introduced our series on buying a house in France in the last part of the series. Planning your move is essential, the next most important thing is acquiring fluency in the language.

This aspect will take you the longest period of time so it’s best to start work on it first. You might think that it’s an impossible thing to do or that it will take many years. Fortunately neither is the case and even if you are starting from no knowledge whatsoever of the language you can become fluent in as little as two or three years.

When I started off with the French after a long break, I was expecting it to take many years before I became fluent but in reality it was only two and could have been done in one. So how did I do it?

I was starting off from a very rusty O-Level (GCSE) so thought that a couple of years of night classes would be best to get my French back up to speed again after such a long break. Those night classes (2 hours a week for 20 weeks per year) took me up to roughly A-level conversational French but that’s not really fluency in the sense that I couldn’t chat in French.

The next step was to join a conversation class with the Alliance Francaise in September. I thoroughly recommend them but you need to be aware that the classes can be incredibly intimidating initially and you have to be stubborn enough to just keep going regardless of how dreadful you feel you are doing.

The Alliance Francaise classes operate at a much higher level than A-level French. At A-level you are expected to be able to talk about a range of topics if you know what the topic is in advance (hence you can’t chat at that level), the level above at that is to be able to chat about a range of topics which you don’t know in advance. Alliance Francaise operates at the level about that ie you should be able to talk about anything without being told the topic in advance.

Now you might think that there is absolutely no way you could do that. However, even a GCSE gives you all the vocabulary and grammar that you need. What the Alliance Francaise classes do is to force you to use that knowledge in real time and that’s why the classes are so intimidating at the start.

Anyway, the following September I started the Open University course L120 and did the related residential LXR122 that July. Whilst the Alliance Francaise classes are brilliant for getting your current level of French working much better they aren’t very good for improving your level of French so that’s where the Open University courses come in.

Right in the middle of the residential it was like someone had flicked a switch and all of a sudden I heard the French as though it were English. I’d to meet some French relatives after the course that Summer and was able to chat to them with no effort ie fluently.

So to get to fluency, one route is GCSE, Alliance Francaise and then Open University first year with the residential. I’m sure that’s less time than you expected!

The one thing that is key with learning French is to be stubborn enough to keep going to the classes regardless of how dreadful you feel you are doing. Yes, you will be really bad at the start but the trick with learning languages is to keep going regardless. That’s one reason why I feel it’s essential to be in a class rather than attempting to learn the language on your own. On your own you can easily grind to a halt on some topic which you just can’t understand but in a class environment, the class will force you to simply skip that topic and move on which is OK because you’ll come back to it later.

Our next issue is on staying fluent which, if anything, is more difficult as it feels much more like a chore.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

As the number of house buyers looking at France seems once more to be on the increase, we’re starting a little series today which will take you through all the steps from when you first have the idea of moving to France or just buying a Summer home here to settling in.

Over the course of our little series, we’ll cover all aspects of buying a house in France in enough detail to let you do it with the least amount of hassle. If you’ve already started you can skip a few chapters so to speak by consulting our Moving to France guide and if you’re even further ahead and beginning to settle in our Living in France guide. If you need any services, try our expat services directory; it may be smaller than yahoo but it’s a lot easier to find the services that you’ll require in it.

So, once you’ve decided that you’d like to buy a house in France, where do you start?

Buying a house in France or any country other than your own is a major undertaking and you should never underestimate the amount of work that it will involve. Not only is the language different but the processes that you need to go through are different from those in your own country. Moreover, if you are intending to live full-time in the house then you’ll need to organise moving your furniture from one country to another which is never cheap. That’s before you even consider that chances are you’re moving from somewhere in a town or city to somewhere in a country and even doing that in your own country can be a bit of a culture shock before you start adding in the complications of a new language, culture, social security systems and the like.

With so many things to consider you might be thinking that it’s an impossible task. It’s not, but you do need to put a fair amount of effort into the planning of your move if you want it to be a success and that’s where this series will help you as it will cover all aspects of buying a house in France over the course of the next few months but in bite-size chunks so that you’re not overwhelmed by it.

Planning your move is very much key to a succesful move to France. To do this you will need to sit down and sketch out all the things that you need to do and when they need to be done. The list will be very long, but don’t worry about that, just try to make sure that everything that needs to be done is on the list and it will all work out in the end.

Anyway, that’s probably enough of an introduction for now. Over the coming weeks, we hope to provide you with information on everything that you need to know in order to plan your move to France.

In our next installment we’ll be covering the one thing that will make most difference in easing your transition to France: the language.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

I’ll start with the itinerary as I’ll be getting going on that next Tuesday:
– Tuesday pm, get the plane in Perpignan and finish up in Belfast in the late evening
– Wednesday am, meeting in town in the morning then open a few carpetbagging accounts for our latest addition and get a few things in town
Siobhan: I could probably catch up with you sometime that day
– Thursday, French exam; we usually get away from that relatively early as they do the oral part in the afternoon
– Friday am, probably working my way down Wendy’s shopping list; pm probably calling in to see the folk in Rosepark
guys: remind me to leave £40 for Eric!!
– Saturday, “at liberty” as they say in the travel trade but more than likely filled up with calling to see folk
– Sunday lunchtime, on the plane to Barcelona to try out Jet2, getting there early evening and back here around teatime

With the departure of our last house hunter on Tuesday a week ago, we were planning on switching to “winter mode” ie getting stuck into the backlog of things that we’ve not had a chance to do since June. We had even made a start on writing out our “to do” list for the winter months. And then we got some more bookings for October which has since started to fill up quite nicely.

We finally picked up a booking from the hotel website that we’re on. I’d really high hopes of that but we’ve been on it since late August and so far only the one booking (though it is for a week). Now that we’ve actually picked up a booking via the hotel site, we found out that they’d a duff room description for our main type of booking room (what did they think a “double shared bathroom shared” was? They’re fixing that now so we should start to get more bookings from them over the winter and, all being well, lots more in the summer. The other little problem that they had was that they’d recorded us as having no rooms available which certainly doesn’t help the reservations. Anyway, we’re getting the room type sorted, have updated the availability and changed a couple of rooms over to “instant booking” from “on request” which collectively should bring in a whole bunch more people.

They’re actually our eighth house-hunter since about mid-July which is a fair old number considering that we’re only one of the hotels in the area. Of those, three have already bought houses in the three villages closest to us, two more are in the process of buying a little further afield and one is in “area hunting” so won’t be buying for a year or so. As you can imagine, all this activity is lifting the house prices and I read last week that the prices in Languedoc-Roussillon went up 28% in the last year, mainly due to the English. Still, we did see quite a reasonable house for sale in Estagel for EUR 50 000 the other week so it’s still possible to pick up a bargain. Funnily enough, only one of those folk booked as a result of our ad in French Property News and seeing as they only stayed two days, we may as well not have bothered with it.

We had SNOW last week!! OK, more sleet than proper snow but even so, it’s not really something that you expect in the south of France in September, is it?

The banks here are really dreadful to what we’re used to. In all ways: the maximum withdrawal limit is around £300 per WEEK vs the £250-£500 per DAY in the UK; they’ve got monthly spending limits on debit cards; they charge for debit cards and the few sort-of credit cards are a) charged for b) have MAXIMUM limits lower than the minimum limits on some UK cards and c) have interest rates getting on for twice the UK rates (the mortgage rates are higher too: so much for lower euro-zone interest!). Way back at the end of June we thought we’d settle in with local accounts so opened accounts with Credit Agricole. The cards arrived in a few weeks but we still haven’t seen any sign of the chequebooks. Anyway, on Thursday a little letter arrived from CA saying that I’d to sort out my EUR 50 overdrawn by Monday or they were blocking all transactions on my accounts. Well, that was that. Off we went to close it and give them a piece of our minds. For a start, the account was to have a EUR 1000 overdraft limit (Wendy’s account came with EUR 450, none apparently for me) and seeing as I needed the chequebook before I could use the account, the entire EUR 50 was all bank charges. Didn’t go down well with CA in St Paul. For a start our “relationship manager” wasn’t there; I said “close it anyway, and the savings account too”. I don’t think people go in and close accounts too often. Anyway, less than 20 mins later we got a call from M Martin (our relationship manager) asking what was the problem. He’s assured us that the chequebook will be with us by Wednesday. We got the impression that he’d told the **** who sent out the letter to wise up: blocking the accounts of somebody who pays several thousand euro a month to the bank for a mortgage when he’s overdrawn by EUR 50 is not a good move.

Oh yeah, the “to do” list… Well, this is what we have so far:

1. Move into print advertising.
We are already listed in “GeoGuide Languedoc-Roussillon” courtesy of the previous owner but will be adding at least one more guidebook (well, a series as we’re shooting for an international listing). The French “guidebooks” are truly dreadful as they are just advertising with next to no editorial but it’s handy from our point of view as we can just pay so many euros and get ourselves in. Most likely we will go with Petit Futé although GeoGuide and Routard are both in the frame. Petit Futé would be around £500 but that’s for three years and also enters us in four or five international equivalent guides as well; we’ve not checked out the prices for the other two although I imagine that they pale into insignificance with the £500 for cheznous. Actually, French Property News isn’t far behind with it’s £60 a month (and so far only one two night booking for £120 expenditure!).

2. Get going on maintenance
We’re planning on restarting our “live in a room for a night” programme with a view to sussing out what needs done to each room. The biggest problem is the gite which, although it’s the newest “room”, looks incredibly basic in comparison to the rest of the hotel. We don’t really book it much as an apartment so in parallel with sprucing it up a bit, we’re hoping to create a little suite by adding a door between two of the rooms. That will also give us a lot more flexibility in coping with larger groups: we had to turn away several groups of four during August when the gite was full; in principle it will also let us book the gite as a gite rather than as a hotel room although we did very well over the summer just booking it as a hotel room.

3. Visit the neighbours
We just started doing this when the bookings took a jump; the plan is to work our way around the various vineyards, say “hi”, and maybe expand our wine list for the restaurant by buying a box or two at each place. We’ll be using these visits to try and build up a group of vineyards for our proposed wine tours.

4. Build up the guide
Our regional guide at www.mascamps.com/region/en.htm isn’t bad but I’d like to beef it up some more as we get a lot of hits via it and also because it should encourage people to stay a bit longer. We’ve the easy places done already so this will probably mean quite a bit of travelling around and combing the local tourist offices for information. I’m also hoping to make the event list (www.mascamps.com/event/en.htm) a whole lot more comprehensive although that will be far from easy as they are simply dreadful at promoting any kind of event or festival over here.

5. Tidy up the “house”
The hotel was and is tidy but the house side of the place needs a LOT of work. We could do with some furniture for a start and we could do with sorting out a lot of new lightbulbs as it’s getting to be too dark now.

6. Get the admin sorted
This has been sidelined for several months now so it’ll take me a while to catch up with it all. We also need to get ourselves properly sorted in respect of the French authorities with the stuff that I talked about earlier. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to track down our drinks license.

7. Build up the activities list
We’re hoping to have a reasonable number of activity-breaks built up over the coming months. So far, we’ve used the “specials” facility on the hostel booking site but we’re hoping to add those more directly onto our own website and also on an activities booking system. We haven’t had a lot of direct success with these but have made quite a bit of money through people seeing the “special” and booking direct with us (we don’t have to pay commission that way). At the moment we’ve several variants of our “Ryanair seat sale” package online to cover the whole period of their seat sale up to February but it’ll be another week or so before that appears on google so we’ve not had any takers as yet.

8. Website development
The next “big thing” will be the arrival of the vineyard pages, probably with the initial version online by late October. I’ve been taking more photos for that during the week. I’d liked to have had it live before Michel goes to the wine fair but that’s not too likely as I believe that’s early October. Oh, he (and possibly us) might be on French TV by the time you read this. Seems that his “separator thingy” for the grapes is the only one in the region and the local paper (the Independant) was here on Thursday to do an article on it. The harvest pages will be the first to go live as the sheer volume of text in them should get us a reasonable ranking in google. Haven’t really given much thought to the structure of his bit of the site yet but there will, in due course, be a www.mascamps.com/cave/en.htm page corresponding to the existing www.mascamps.com/hotel/en.htm page. Once his pages are up and running, we might run up a totally new www.mascamps.com/en.htm page to act as a gateway into both halves of the website but ’tis early days for that.

9. Website promotion
I’ll be restarting my “Sunday Searches” again to find free/cheapo places to promote the site. Have to see how to go about promoting the vineyard section as well. You would be amazed at how many different places you can pick up in two or three hours searching. You’d also be amazed at how many websites charge astronomical amounts of money for incredibly naff listings. We actually only paid for one site listing this year (all of £30) which has given us a really impressive looking entry with them (www.greatbedandbreakfast.com), lots of enquiries and no paying customers. At the other end of the scale, £200 on www.cheznous.com has, so far, given us one hit, no enquiries and no bookings. We’re actually going with cheznous again but this time we’ll be in their printed brochure (another £500!) which should hit the streets around Christmas (that’ll be their last chance).

Where are our customers coming from anyway? Well, it’s hard to say as the mix has changed significantly since April. April/May/June most customers were driveby (though the most profitable was via the website), early July was a mix of phone and driveby and August/September have been almost evenly split between phone, website and Ryanair (with virtually no drivebys). For the coming months, it looks like we’ll be mainly getting people from the Ryanair site though we’ve been getting significant numbers of enquiries via the website and should be having our very first repeat booking in December. In practical terms, we work on the assumption that the bulk of the phone reservations are effectively customers of the previous owner which means that for this summer we’ve had getting on for triple the customers that he would have had and that doesn’t seem too far off the mark as we know we had more reservations than both of the local competitors put together from mid-July through to the end of August (that’s the entire period for which we had their figures). If we can manage to keep that up we should do pretty well if next year is more normal (this year was dreadful for hotels all over France) and, of course, we are still increasing the number of places that list us.

10. Sort out our registration
In an ideal world, we’d like to be listed as a “hotel restaurant” but we’re not sure if that’s possible in one jump so we will be making enquiries to see what we’d need to do to acquire that listing. The plus side is that we could then legitimately run the restaurant but on the downside we would, over time, need to redo a lot of our existing registrations: cheznous wouldn’t take us anymore for a start (OK, so that would save £500 a year). We’d also need to change the Ryanair entry to move onto their hotel pages which may or may not be a good idea: we’ve only had one booking from our proper hotel listing (on www.venere.com) yet got our first booking from the B&B/guesthouse/hostel listing the day after it went live and have done very well with it ever since.

11. Have a look at Spanish
I’ve already got the pre-course course for the OU Spanish diploma but need to have a look at that to see whether or not I could realistically start the diploma in February. We get quite a lot of Spanish guests so it would be useful. On the other hand, we get next to no Germans so perhaps I need a German language website? Hard to say, as I’ve already got a German version of the Ryanair mini-site and we’ve yet to get anyone booking through it (a friend of a friend translated it for me).

Anyway, most head on to get ready for the Danish folk who should be here in another hour or two. They always quote 6pm arrival times but it just ain’t feasible to get from Denmark to here in a day and arrive that early. I reckon 8pm will be closer to the mark.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Our washing machine is on it’s last legs so we thought we’d get ourselves a new one before it keels over altogether so it was off to Darty. Thought we’d get a make that we’d heard of as supposedly it would be more reliable but seeing as the cheapest one I’d heard of was EUR 439 and the cheapest cheapo make was EUR 199 we figured, “hey, so what if it breaks down after the two year guarantee; we’ll just buy another one”. Anyway, el cheapo washing machine should be turning up sometime tomorrow. And even better, I got to use my brand new Amex card! Yes, we have now found two shops that take it. Not exactly the most useful card to have in France although it does look very pretty.

Seeing as it looks reasonably likely that the assorted Inland Revenue offices will consider me as a Crown Servant I figured that we’d best get the tax credit & child benefit claims in for John in case there’s some limit to the backdating of payments. It sounded a good enough argument to the child tax guy who was all set to pay us the tax credit but our record is currently locked (those guys gotta get a new computer system!) so that’s certainly sounding promising. Child benefit are debating the issue as supposedly you need to pay national insurance in the UK to get it but, assuming that the main tax office accept the Crown Servant status, that’s where I’d be paying it so I guess it’s a matter of waiting for their decision. Snag is that the French tax year ends in December so I need them to decide pretty soon. The biggest plus point would be that I could ditch our **** French accountant, all being well I’ll be looking for a UK accountant very shortly.

Also thought it was time to regularise Wendy a bit so it was off to the work permit place (for reasons which are even more complicated than I could possibly describe here). Anyway, after a very long chat there which which brilliant for my French, we now have to go to the Mairie to see about getting the residence permit which should have been here a month or two ago.

Oh, nationality again… the Paris guy reckoned, no, John wasn’t British because the new nationality legislation of 2002 still isn’t in force yet (despite it having gone through parliament over two years ago!). However, as I queried a few things he dug himself into a hole and now has to consult HQ. To summarise the state of affairs: as the old nationality legislation is still in force, I can’t pass my nationality on to John (they define “father” as “husband”). However, children born to Crown Servants (a rather significant status) are treated as though they were born in the UK. Were he born in the UK, Wendy could actually give him British nationality as she has a residence permit which is automatically renewable (next month in fact) ie she can live in the UK “without limitation” which means that in Belfast we could get a passport, so adding that to the Crown Servant status means that…. our man in Paris can’t answer the nationality question but he now realises that he’s given me enough rope to hang him! So, it’s possible that we could just apply for a UK passport for him in Paris (or indeed in Belfast when I’m over). Laughably, we can now get James a British passport so perhaps we’ll manage a consistent set some of these days (we’ve been pulled up twice in the airports already as it looks very suspicious to have a British guy and an Australian girl taking an Irish child abroad).

We’re now up to five separate groups of people who’ve stayed here since July and are buying houses. Latest arrival is a couple from Bristol who are off househunting as I write this. We haven’t actually noticed the prices going up and you can still get quite a reasonable place in the next village for about EUR 50,000. However, we did notice a similar property to ours (though about half the size) on sale for EUR 900,000 last week which is getting on for twice what we paid and seeing as our place is more than twice (possibly as much as triple) the size of it, I guess ours is worth more like EUR 1,500,000. Hmmm, almost enough to sell up & retire. Seriously though, if there were a way of getting the place valued over here, we’d be quite keen on having that valuation to take along to the bank.

I guess now and again it comes across that it’s a complete nightmare living here with all the bureaucratic nonsense that they get up to sometimes and the last week or two has certainly been one of those times when it’s end to end bureaucratic dead-ends. But then we sit back and think: hey, it’s September, it’s 30 in the shade, we’ve a really serious suntan, we own a hotel (that definitely falls in the category of phrases I never expected to be uttering, in spite of the odd joke after Roger bought the restaurant), and whilst we may have the French bureaucracy to deal with now and again, we’ve none of the daily hassles of working for anyone else. And aside from anything else, running a hotel is dead on: the guests are only here in the morning and evening so we’ve pretty much the whole day to ourselves.

Almost forgot, it looks like Mark C has relinquished his title of the “tightest tourist” (jointly held with Norman H and my Mum) and will be venturing over next year. Although, I’m sure he’ll be pushing for discounts when he gets here… He’ll also be making his second TV appearance, in France this time (naturally all costs being met by someone else!).

Arnold

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.