Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Once you’re in France for a while, chances are that you’ll come across a few “experts” that is somebody doing something or other that comes with the title of “expert”.

In fact, the meaning is somewhat different to the english word and equates to something along the lines of “senior” so that you find “Expert Comptables” ie Senior Accountants and so on. However, whilst the meaning doesn’t translate across to the word “expert” in english, in practice it seems to be taken as meaning that in many instances ie that the “expert” can’t possibly be wrong because they are an expert.

Even those who don’t regale under the title of “expert” in their profession are often taken to be essentially infallable when working in their field. So, for example, the assumption is that whatever comes out of an official channel is bound to be correct is quite common and therefore not to be questioned. Perhaps our own accountant provides the best example of this practice. In common with everyone else in France starting a business she received a bill from the social security people for around 3000‚€ when she started her consultancy business and in common with almost everyone else she paid it. In fact, it’s not actually necessary to pay it as it’s based on an estimate of what you might earn in your first year of business and if you tell them the true figure then their demand for payment drops around 90%.

Perhaps the worst example of this is in the area of estimating the value of a car after an accident. Obviously there can be a lot of uncertainty in any estimate as no two cars will have been used identically of course. Yet, the expert accepts no uncertainty: his price is the only price and must be correct because he is the expert. Except that, naturally, even experts make mistakes.

So be wary of the “experts” in France for they seem to believe that their expertise is carved in stone and unquestionably correct. Even when it’s wrong.

Whilst it’s easy enough to come up with a price for a house in a town where there are a lot of similar houses around and a regular turnover, it’s an entirely different matter in rural France.

For a start, once you get into the countryside, houses aren’t all the same. Even two similar looking cottages won’t come with the same price attached because they’ll be in different locations with different views and so on. And, of course, they’ll not be the same inside either nor will they have been equally well maintained. Finally, there just isn’t the regularity of turnover of housing in the French countryside as you get in a typical town in the UK.

So how do the French price their houses? Well, first off they look around at the various estate agent brochures that seem to be in every place you could possibily find them. The French don’t have a single estate agent selling a property usually so there are even more brochures than you might expect.

They look for vaguely similar houses to what they have to sell and take a view on whether their’s is worth more or less than the price being asked. What they don’t do usually is to ask the estate agent what the price should be and therefore the prices listed aren’t necessarily realistic. In fact, most are actually conversions from some relatively arbitrary figure in French francs with the estate agent commission being added on (hence the slightly peculiar sums that you sometimes see being asked).

So, don’t take the price in the estate agents brochure as gospel. It’s usually not based on any firm idea of what the house should be worth so you may well be able to negotiate either the price or what’s included in the price.

It’s back to school today for James which means that we’ve to start getting up at a fixed time yet again.

One of the oddities about this business is that there are no regular hours at all. During the summer we generally need to be up no later than 7.30am each day and often need to stay around the office until after 11pm each night. Once we get outside the peak period though there starts to be periods of a day or two when we’ve nobody in and can lay in a while and over the winter you often get stretches of a week or more at a time when you can take it easy.

Well, perhaps “take it easy” isn’t the right description as we use those times sans guests to get various bits of maintenance done, to catch up with the administration and move more into our little empire of online activities. Still, ’tis nice not to have both the early start and late finish for a while even if it is a little muddied by school days.

When you run a booking service, you get a strange perspective of the holiday booking habits of people which is generally at odds with what you’d think people would really do.

For instance, our B&B sites pick up a lot of traffic from around April through to August each year and outside that they’ve relatively low numbers of visitors. That’s understandable really as most B&B bookings are for just a few days at a time at most and you wouldn’t expect people to book short term holidays a long time in advance.

It’s quite different for the self-catering sites though. For them the booking season started just before Christmas and we’re getting so much traffic on the sites at the moment that it looks like we’ll need to upgrade the bandwidth next week. In fact, the traffic is pretty much as high as it was in the peak of the summer season!

Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.