House Hunting Part I - The fall of the favourites

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.

The Goldilocks Decision

Having made the momentous decision that 2012 was going to be the year in which we would to turn our dreams into reality, the next big question was to decide in which of France’s many and varied regions we wanted to make our new home?

I guess like so many who have made the move before us we were inevitably attracted to the French regions where we had previously enjoyed our holidays. For us this included Normandy, Provence, Limousin, Aquitaine, Burgundy and Ile de France (Paris to be precise).

Each of these areas had left their impact on us: cruising along the gentle River Saone on a family boating holiday; sipping red wine on a summer’s evening in the gite garden whilst watching the mellow Limousin cattle munching grass; gazing at Isabelle’s long, tanned limbs as she lay by the pool (did I mention that before?); watching our daughter run naked through the fountains of the Parc Citroen (not a drunken student prank this one, she was only 7 at the time to be fair!); having our car broken into and our passports stolen whilst we visited a war cemetery near Caen (I'm afraid that memory put Normandy out of the running - unfair I know but the emotions of that day still linger).

We had also been subscribing to magazines like Living France and French Property News for several years and we had read countless articles describing life in every area of France. The problem of course is that everywhere sounded wonderful; no one was going to write about their chosen home in anything but glowing terms.

So we started with the Goldilocks decision making process.

Provence in the South – way too hot for us.

Brittany and Normandy in the North – an Atlantic climate too much like the UK.

The ‘middle bit’ around Limoges – just right.

Paris – great for a visit but much too busy and clogged up for us, not to mention way too expensive. The Creuse and Correze departments of the Limousin offered some of the cheapest property in France but their remoteness perhaps didn’t offer us the best opportunity to implement our business ideas (more of which in a later post!). The departments to the south and west of Limoges (Dordogne, Haute Vienne and Charente) – just right.

Of course, these three departments cover a huge area so we started to narrow it down using transport links as a guide – we marked on a map all the airports within two hours of the region which offered flights to the UK and we took note of where the TGV stopped off as it raced south. What started to emerge as a target area for us was the Parc Naturel Regional Perigord Limousin with Limoges Airport close by and the airports of Bergerac, Poitiers and even Bordeaux within striking distance. The excellent TGV service allowed Paris to be reached in less than three hours from Angouleme to the west.

The Parc Naturel Regional Perigord Limousin covers a large area but as we read more about the region it became clear that the section of countryside known as the Perigord Vert would suit us very nicely.

Lush, green countryside dotted with little hamlets and bustling market towns. Lots of beautiful deciduous woodland interspersed with meadows grazed by gentle herds of cattle. And above all, we knew from previous trips that it offered us the peace and tranquility that we so desperately sought.

The Perigord Vert is primarily encapsulated within the Dordogne department. Whilst it has unfortunately developed something of a ‘Dordogneshire’ reputation because of the number of English people living in the area, we knew that this rural area was still quintessentially French and conservative in its outlook and we had only ever encountered extremely welcoming and hospitable natives. Beside which, we were not looking to get drawn in to the “Expat Community” who still get their groceries delivered by Asda, play cricket at the weekend and go in search of fish and chips on a Friday night - we wanted to move to France because we saw a more fulfilling was to live life and we wanted to make friendships with the French, to learn from them and to immerse ourselves in the local culture.

With property prices well below the French national average we realized we might achieve our dream to live mortgage free in a tranquil cottage on the edge of a village with space around us to breathe and an acre or two of land for the dogs to roam free on. We also knew we would have to find a way to make a living and it appeared that this was an area that would suit what we had in mind as a business (not telling you more yet, you’re going to have to wait!).

On my wall at home in the UK, I pinned a map of the area we had now decided to focus on (see below) and started to absorb the detail of the towns, the topography, the main routes and the places of interest. I started to turn the dream into a clearer vision of where we were going to make our new life – then I started to plan in detail how we were going to make this happen. I’ll tell you about that next time though!