Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Although Bayrou appears to be in third place, the peculiarities of the two stage electoral process in France mean that he’s the candidate with the greatest potential majority in the second stage, assuming that he gets through the first stage of course. It seems that the candidates in France have had a similar analysis of the voting possibilities to our own and are adjusting their approaches accordingly.

As reported in the Financial Times, this has already had a considerable impact on socialist thinking with an unsigned manifesto in Le Point calling for quite a radical rethinking of socialist policies. In effect, this would represent the realignment of socialism in France that happened with socialism elsewhere in Europe some years ago. Will that realignment happen this time around? I suspect not as there seems very little time before the election now and I can’t really see such a change being one that the electorate would believe.

To an outsider Sarkozy doesn’t seem to need that radical shift in ideology required by Segolene in that he runs what appears to be a very modern party with equally up to date policies. A few weeks ago I thought that his approach would be a little too radical for France at this time but apparently not if the polls are to believed. It does seem though that it’s now even more important that he aims to knock Bayrou out of the race at this point.

What about Bayrou in all this? In many ways it seems as though he is likely to win not so much as a positive statement by the electorate but rather as a vote against the other two candidates which is, of course, exactly what happened last time around when Chriac came up against Le Pen in the second round. The difference this time around is that Bayrou seems to be a realistic possibility in the eyes of the electorate and perhaps we will be referring to him as President Bayrou in just a few months time. If they’re lucky perhaps he will even deliver that “third way” that the French often seem so keen on having but have never quite managed.

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.

St Patrick’s Day is an odd sort of day in Northern Ireland.For one thing, although St Patrick is celebrated as an Irish saint, he was actually British. Naturally, he was Catholic as there wasn’t anything else in terms of Christian religions in his time.

France is massive and so is the variety of houses that you can get with everything from small apartments to large castles on the market and locations varying from the city centre of Paris to rural areas with just the odd passing cow for traffic.The first things that you need to decide for yourself when looking for a place in France are what type of property you want and what kind of area you would like that property to be in. These two aspects are closely inter-related in that you won’t be able to buy a chateau in the centre of Paris nor buy a chic apartment in rural Roussillon.The days of run-down barns available for a few thousand pounds are long since gone and prices these days start at around 50,000‚€ which will buy you anything from a reasonable townhouse in the country to an apartment on the outskirts of a town. What that price won’t buy you is a chic apartment in the centre of Paris nor will it buy you a massive farmhouse ready to move into.

On the other hand, there are still bargains around. As we write this, there are a number of quite charming chateaux for sale at around the 600,000‚€ (£400,000) mark although at that price level you should expect to have some work to do to them. Similarly, if you are prepared to move outside the brit-enclaves and into the real France you will find quite substantial properties for perhaps 300,000‚€ (£200,000) although again you should expect to do some work at this level.

Where are these brit-enclaves though? Well, one easy to find them is to pick your favourite B&B listing site (which must be, of course, Chambre-d’Hote) and look at areas with large numbers of listings. At the moment, you’ll find these mainly around Brittany/Normandy, Poitou-Charentes, Dordogne and Cote d’Azur. Prices in these ares are, generally, that little bit higher than in the surrounding areas for comparable properties.

If you haven’t got your heart set on a particular region in France, the best thing to do is to make up a list of the characteristics of the type of area that you are looking for. For example, we wanted a place that was within 10km of water that we could swim in which meant that we looked at properties near the coast and near lakes etc. We also wanted somewhere broadly in the southern half of France which narrowed down the search a little. Finally, we wanted somewhere with views of the mountains which reduced the areas somewhat more.

Doing this will bring up a number of regions that you may not have thought about before and give you a much wider selection of properties. Note too that it’s best to think about why you want a particular feature eg we didn’t say that we wanted to be on the coast but rather that we wanted to be near water that we could swim in. Likewise we said that we wanted somewhere scenic rather than with views of the mountains.

Chirac has presided over a range of fairly high profile controversies since beginning with his authorisation of the nuclear tests in the Pacific just after his election in 1995. Just two years later he tried to manipulate the electoral process by dissolving the parliament and forcing an election at an opportune time for his own party though, such was the opposition to this action, he ended up weakening his powerbase.

Unexpectedly facing Le Pen in the second round of elections in 2002, he naturally had a landslide victory. The defeat of the European constitution in 2005 was quite a blow both to him and other nations in Europe. As with the nuclear tests in 1995, he typically followed solely the interests of France in opposing the war with Iraq. Also seemingly typical of French politicians, he withdrew the proposed First Employment Contract (Contrat Première Embauche or CPE) in the face of widespread student protests against this move to make it easier to both hire and fire young people.

On the whole, I think he will be remembered as one of the most typically French politicians. He seemed to consider only the interests of France abroad and followed (on the whole) the desires (if not always the needs) of the French people within the country.

Although it seemed likely that he would lose the election had he stood this time around, he seemed to recognise in his speech that France needs a different type of leadership in the future, one that begins to consider more completely France’s place in Europe and that takes a firmer stand on necessary policy changes.