Having settled in to our rented home in
Busserolles we were excited by the prospect of starting the search for our
dream French home.
This was a subject that had occupied us
quite happily for years before ever arriving in France (the “dreaming years”).
We would each spend hours at a time sat at our separate computers as we trawled
the internet looking at French houses. At the end of each session we would
excitedly share our favourites and our bookmark lists became clogged with links
to those we thought might just be “the one”!
We signed up to the main property portals
offering French homes for sale (France Property Shop, Sextant, Greenacres and
Latitudes were among our preferred sites) and would eagerly await the weekly
updates of new properties landing in our inbox.
The exercise of picking out our favourite
on-line properties did help us to develop our criteria for selecting our dream
French home; it would be a characterful stone cottage with wooden shutters, perhaps
in need of some improvement but not a major restoration; it would be in a
tranquil location, not overlooked but within easy access (walk or cycle) of a
baker and a small village shop; and it would have an acre or so of land
attached so that the dogs could happily romp in their own meadow…..ahhh, the
dream!
Despite all the internet searching, we knew
that there could be no substitute for physically viewing a property so, having
arrived, we couldn’t wait to get started. We would be searching the whole of
the Perigord Vert region, which meant that we had hundreds of square kilometers
to search. Starting with our list of favourites from the internet search we
made contact with the relevant estate agents, the ‘immobiliers’, and set up our
first few viewing trips.
Before I tell you about our viewing trip
experiences, a word or two about immobiliers and the way they work in France in
comparison to estate agents in the UK. French properties are rarely marketed by
just one immobilier – because it is the buyer who pays the immobilier’s fees,
the seller has no qualms about asking every immobilier they know to market
their house. As a consequence two things happen: firstly, before you visit a
property, the immobilier will only ever give you a vague idea as to its
location because they fear that the competition will find out and start
marketing it as well. Secondly, the immobilier will want to take you to see not
only the house that you have enquired about but also as many other similar
properties on their books as they can – this is because if they take you to see
a house first and you later decide to buy it, they get all the fees!
The consequence of this modus operandi is
that the immobilier’s preference is to meet you in a mutually convenient
location away from the house you want to view (typically in the town square or
by La Poste) and then to drive you in their car. As well as making it more
difficult to know exactly where you are going, it also ensures that the
immobilier has you captive for the day!
Consequently some of our viewing trips
turned into tiresome days as we were dragged from one unsuitable property to
the next. We always seemed to be “just passing” a property that they had on the
market which would invariably be described as “an interesting wildcard worth
having a look at”. The fact that it met very few of our criteria seemed to
matter not a jot and, being English and very polite, we would try to find
something positive to say about the property.
“At least we’d be able to get to the bar
easily – it’s just next door” or “The saw mill is noisy but it’s quite well
screened by those trees”.
Eventually we learned our lesson and
realised that brutal honesty was best! When a mystery house was suggested we
would question the immobilier carefully and refuse to go if it sounded anything
less than perfect.
Of even greater disappointment was the fact
that even properties we had asked to view based on our internet research turned
out to be real disappointments when we got up close and personal. One by one
our list of favourites fell by the wayside. A previously unmentioned busy road
running at the bottom of the garden; a fabulous location but with a barn so
ruined and dangerous that it would have needed to be demolished; a property
that looked wonderful in the photos – photos that had been taken two years
previously, since when the house had been empty and was crumbling at an
alarming rate.
The photographs shown in this post are just a few of the properties that we viewed but subsequently discounted. We started to become thoroughly
disheartened by the house hunting process and could only console ourselves with
the fact that at least we were in France and lucky enough to be in rented
accommodation so not under serious pressure to buy. Deep down though we yearned
for a place of our own that we could call home and start to make our mark on.
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