Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

Just before the peak season last year we thought that we’d try a mailshot to promote our listings sites and fired off a few hundred e-mails.We offer a listing broadly comparable to that from sites that charge around £100 and up and attract a reasonable number of bookings for those listed too which isn’t surprising as we get around 1500 visitors to the site per day at the moment, more than several sites charging around £50 get. However, the word “free” actually put people off and we even received a number of e-mails accusing of being behind some dasterdly and dishonest scheme.So we added an option of paying £29.

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.

Most people think of the south of France as purely a Summer holiday destination but in reality it’s pretty much an all year round one.The July/August period is probably the very worst time to go to the south on holiday. Temperatures are almost always above 30c and frequently clear 40 which makes for a very exhausting time for many activities. In fact, neither walkers nor cyclists attempt to do anything from about mid-July to the end of August.

Even aside from the heat, you’ll find that the traffic is heavier than the roads are geared up for. We’ve given up trying to get down to some of the beach resorts over most of the Summer as we found that we were sitting an hour or more in traffic and then found that we couldn’t park anywhere when we did get to the resort as there’s so little public transport everyone ends up going in their car. On some peak days, even the motorway grinds to a halt as we reported in August.

If you want the heat it’s still there just outside that peak period and pretty much anytime from April to October is t-shirt weather here most of the time. Aside from Easter and during the grape harvest in September the traffic is very light and you’ll find it relatively easy to get accommodation booked too.

The Autumn is a little peculiar here. Due to the heat in the Summer, most places end up looking rather burnt and the grass only starts to grow again in September. That makes for quite an odd time colour-wise. After the grape harvest in late August/early September the vines start to adopt the normal Autumn colours but at the same time pretty much everything else is starting to grow after the weather cools down a little. This stretches out the Autumn period right into January.

Although the cold season runs from around mid January through to the end of February, calling it the “cold season” is quite misleading as many of those days are t-shirt weather. Unlike in more northern areas of Europe, when it’s sunny here, it’s warm regardless of the time of year. Where you need to be careful is with the altitude as even a few hundred metres can mean the difference between warm (hot even) and very cold. For instance, here at Mas Camps we have had one day of snow in the time that we’ve been here yet just 30 minutes or so to the west is the village of St Paul which generally gets proper Winter weather from around January to March. The boundary is very marked and you can find the western edge of the village in snow whilst the eastern edge is in t-shirt weather.

Anyway, why not think of a short break in the south of France right now to escape the cold and storms in the UK?

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

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.

Most people have their holiday in France during the Summer but in many ways that’s one of the worst times to come.For a start, France largely closes down in August so you can often find places closed. Those that are open are very crowded as the majority of the French take their holidays from mid-July to the penultimate week in August so you’ll often find hotels full during that period and, of course, the prices are at their peak too.

The Winter in France is quite different. Prices are lower and most places are open so you won’t have any problem getting somewhere to stay and, naturally, the flight prices are a good deal lower. One thing that does close is the hotels, usually from October to March but there remains a lot of availability as the number of tourists drops substantially. One that doesn’t is the Auberge Mas Camps which is open all year and has an ideal location between the mountains and the sea.

Isn’t it cold? In the central, northern and mountain areas, yes it is. In the south it’s cold in the evenings but it’s frequently t-shirt weather during the day and indeed I’m writing this in a t-shirt whilst thinking about getting the shorts out, right in the middle of January! Don’t go by what the locals are wearing as you often see them wearing heavy Winter clothing when the temperatures are in the high 20s.

You’ll also find that the villages and towns are a good deal more French in the Winter too. The absence of tourists makes quite a difference and, especially if you’re considering a purchase here, it’s definitely worth a visit over the Winter period.