Foreign Perspectives

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.