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Buying a house in France: part 12: housing: where to look for a house
March 19th, 2007 | 
Author: 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.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Would you bet on this horse-race?
The French presidential election is a two stage process which creates almost a horse race approach to the presentation of statistics from the various polls.
Whilst Sarkozy is clearly the front runner and, to a UK audience, “obviously” he will win, that’s not quite so obvious as it might appear. If, as seems likely, the first stage vote doesn’t give Sarkozy over 50% of the vote then the top two polling candidates will proceed to the second stage of the voting.
As we write this, it seems certain that Sarkozy will get through to the second stage and let’s take that as read for the moment to simplify the rest of this discussion.
The second person who gets through is far from a sure thing at this point as the polls are indicating that Royal is sitting on 23% and Bayrou on 21%. Considering how polls work, it’s quite possible that the real position is, say, Royal on 21% and Bayrou on 23%. Yes, the polls indicate a margin of error which would exclude that but that’s before you consider the major problem that the pollsters face which is that those they ask sometimes say what “sounds good” rather than saying the way that they will actually vote. Some years ago this resulted in a totally incorrect prediction in the UK in the days when people thought that they should say they were going to vote Labour but they actually voted Conservative on election day.
In any event, the second position candidate could be either Royal or Bayrou which leaves us with two possibilities for the second round ie Sarkozy vs Royal or Sarkozy vs Bayrou.
Interestingly, the polls indicate that Sarkozy will only win if he is up against Royal in the second round and even then only by a small margin (2%). If he’s up against Bayrou, chances are that he’ll lose by a fairly large margin (10%). So, although Sarkozy has a comfortable 6% lead on Royal on the first round, he’s more likely to lose the second round than he is to win it.
I don’t know if they get into tactical voting in France, but if they do, it looks like it would be worthwhile for Sarkozy supporters to be encouraging Royal supporters and for Bayrou supporters to be encouraging Sarkozy supporters at this point.
Would you still bet on the outcome of the race?
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Happy St Patrick’s Day!
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.
In years gone by, the combination of those two facts produced a peculiar result in Northern Ireland. Although considered the patron saint of the whole island of Ireland ie of both the Republic of Ireland and of Northern Ireland, in NI at one time he was “taken over” by those that would consider themselves Irish (effectively the Catholic population) and thus the celebrations of his day were largely in “Irish” parts of NI. I get the impression that things are changing and the celebrations are less exclusively Irish these days but I suspect it’ll be several years before St Patrick’s day becomes a completely non-nationalistic event in Northern Ireland.
Perhaps the most appropriate place to celebrate St Patrick’s Day is in the Northern Ireland town of Downpatrick, where you can find the grave of St Patrick himself in the grounds of the cathedral which hosts a special service on his day. You’ll also find the St Patrick’s exhibition centre in the town and, of course, an annual parade as you can see.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Foreign Perspectives: As seen on TV
Recently, France24 asked me (along with, no doubt, thousands of others) to contribute to a blog portraying the upcoming French presidential election as seen from the eyes of commentators overseas and I contributed my piece on Royal which they subsequently published. My article on Chirac even managed to hold its place as lead story on the site throughout March 12th and was picked up on their broadcasts too thus giving me my 2 seconds of fame.
What most impresses me about all this is that, seemingly for the first time, France is asking the rest of the world what they think of the events in France.
Obviously the presidential election is very much an internal matter for France. However, who the French president is matters outside France: how France reacts on the international stage will be very different depending on whether it’s Sarkozy, Royal or Bayrou as president. So it’s important that this election receives the exposure that it deserves worldwide and not just in France.
France24 itself seems symbolic of this new spirit of outreach through its decision to have a large proportion of its output in English and hopefully it will continue to reach out and pull us anglophones into its circle.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
The T list
The T list contains your favourite travel and tourism blogs. It’s a way of using links to boost smaller blogs and getting more readers. Let me know if you enjoyed any of the blogs listed below.
Instructions
– Write a post.
– Copy/paste the link list from the post you’ve discovered the T-List into it.
– Make sure the links are active and correct.
– If your blog is on the list, remove it’s not a self-promotion post. As Tim Fehlman (Z-List) said : Don’t worry, because if your name is on mine, it’s on others and will spread.’
– Add your favorite tourism and travel blogs on it.
– Add the url of the blog where you’ve discovered the T-List as well.
– Publish the post.
– People will notice the T-List and continue it.
Here is the list
France This Way
Hotel Blogs
Les Explorers
Chrispitality Media Blog
A Luxury Travel Blog
Travel Rants
Travolution Blog
BootBlog
Erin Julian
My Travel Backpack
Happy Hotelier
Radaron
The Travel PR Blog
Europe A La Carte
Normandy Gite
Frenchless in France
French Journal
The Paris Blog
L’Oiseau
Maldives Live
