Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

I read the other day that there are over a million blogs in the world at the moment which is a pretty staggering number. In practice though, the real number of blogs is much smaller. I don’t think that you can really count a blog that’s not been updated for a few months and many of those blogs counted haven’t been updated for over a year.Why is that though? Simple really: you need something to write about, it takes a fair amount of time to keep it up to date and there’s often little indication that people are reading what you write anyway.

This is one area of 21st century living where France is at best in the 20th century and quite often in the 19th, particularly if you’re a foreigner. As you drive through France, that just about every petrol station of any consequence advertises itself as 24/7. If you look at the small print, you’ll find that outside the normal hours of about 8am to noon and 2pm to about 8pm these stations are automated. Fair enough, after all France is quite rural and a lot of these stations don’t get a lot of business outside normal working hours. The snag is that when they’re automated you almost always have to have a French debit card to use them so they’re not really 24/7 if you’re a foreigner.

This sort-of 24/7 service applies to many things in France. For instance, we recently had a problem with our electricity on a Sunday afternoon. We weren’t expecting to get any help from the local electricans as it’s virtually impossible to get them to do anything as regular readers will know so we thought that we’d try calling those advertising themselves as 24/7. It turns out that the expression “24/7” in France means that they have an answering machine switched on outside normal working hours and don’t actually do any work at the weekend. One consequence of this is that there’s a bit of a backlog of work needing to be done each Monday. As a result, none of the electricians that we called at the weekend arrived ’til after the work had been done by a very competent Dutch electrician on Monday morning.

You usually don’t see French expats online, or at least not in English but I just came across one excellent blog that gives a view (in English) of a French resident in America. Reading it definitely gives me a “foreign perspective” on life from there for sure. Every time I’ve been to America it’s always seemed like home. Well, except in Concorde Mass but then that’s where the War of Independence started so you’d expect some differences there (eg those they call patriots, we’d call terrorists in today’s terms).Yet, even though it’s been a considerable time since America and France were on opposite sides of a war, the French still think that they’re subject to “French bashing” by the Americans. Odd.

One of the first signs of the arrival of the brits in an area of France is the occassional appearance of the Sunday Times. Closely followed by that are the British food sections in the local supermarkets.We observed this process in action locally as neither the Sunday Times nor British food aisles were in any of the local supermarkets in April 2004. Within 12 months the Sunday Times started to appear in newsagents in Estagel and most of the local supermarkets had at least a token representation of British goods at extortionate prices.

As you’ll know if you have been following our little saga, we may be living in the south of France but we actually watch BBC Northern Ireland for the news & weather.

So, you would think that we would be aware of a boom in house prices in Northern Ireland, wouldn’t you? We certainly did but in practice it’s one of the things that you need to be living in the country to really notice. We knew that the house prices were going up but just assumed that it was the same drifting up that there has always been whereas in fact it’s been quite a boom lately which we only knew about when a friend from back home mentioned it in passing in an e-mail.

For example, our own house was valued at £117,500 in February 2005 and £130,000 in September 2006 which is a reasonable enough rise in the price. However, right now an identical house has just been sold for £180,000 which is a pretty staggering rise in just a few months. It doesn’t seem to be an isolated jump either as my parents house has gone from around £130,000 at the start of 2005 to £250,000 now.

Unfortunately for anyone wanting to buy their first house, the salaries locally don’t seem to have experienced anything like the increase to warrant such high prices and as a result the rental market seems to be growing quickly too. For example, we had new tenants in our house in under three weeks when ordinarily it would take a few months to find new tenants. What’s also happening is that the earnings multiples on mortgages are moving up with five times income the norm vs just three times only a few years ago.

Who is driving this rise though? Well, as I’m sure you remember Northern Ireland had the “troubles” for most of the last 30 years. What happened over that time is that whenever there was an uptick in violence then the number of people leaving Northern Ireland went up correspondingly. The overall effect is that there are a considerable number of people who consider Northern Ireland as home but who live elsewhere. A side effect of that was that house prices in Northern Ireland were unrealistically low in comparison to elsewhere in the UK yet in the 1960s (before the troubles) prices in Belfast were comparable to those in London.

Now that peace seems more solidly based, those people are starting to come back and they’re driving the house prices through the roof right across the province. In effect, the prices are jumping to catch up with where they would have been had the troubles not happened.

Is there any more of a rise to come though? It would appear so in that the prices still haven’t caught up with those of properties in outer London which they were comparable with in the 1960s. That would imply a price for my parents house of over £500,000 ie about double it’s current price.