Tricky Business

It is five months since we arrived in Busserolles – I cannot believe how fast the time has gone, nor how much we have achieved in that time. We have found and bought and moved into our new house. We have managed to get integrated within the rather complex French healthcare system, including the holy grail attainment of a French social security number (we have met English people over here who have been trying for two years to get that far!).

I have now got three businesses up and running (more about this below) and I have even paid my first tax instalment!

Our life here has settled into an agreeable routine. The baker’s van from the next village comes up to see us in the new house every Wednesday and Saturday. On the other days of the week I wander down to the village post office to collect my bread from the Busserolles baker (following his fire in August he has been baking in another village but drops off the bread to order – he hopes to be back into his Busserolles base before Christmas), stopping along the way to chat to the regulars I always seem to meet (average age around 85 I think but they are a hardy bunch who seem to be out and about in all weathers and always happy to chat to the Englishman).

The covered terrace at Le Clos des Chenes

Since our meeting with the Mayor and his council members in September, the Mayor and his clerk, Martine, have been incredibly helpful. Six weeks after they had written to the Conseil General for the Dordogne (a bit like an English County Council) to seek guidance as to how far back from the road our fence line would need to be, nothing had been heard. With our fencing contractor due to arrive this week, I called in to see if there was any update. The Mayor overheard my conversation with Martine and, clearly not best pleased that no reply had been received, called the Conseil General himself and spoke animatedly to some poor chap for about 10 minutes. True to his word though, the following morning an official arrived and proceeded to survey the road and the edge of our field. It took him an hour after which six luminous green stakes had been planted.

The fencing plan for Le Clos de Chenes

You might expect, as I did, that these stakes marked the fence line that we should follow. “Non” declared the surveyor. His luminous green stakes he explained marked a line that was 50cm in front of the line where we should erect the fence – obviously!

Anyway, back to business. In addition to my property photography business and my property finding business (www.i-spypropertyfinders.com) I have now got a third (and I think final) strand on the go. My status as a registered ‘agent commercial’ has enabled me to take up the offer from my friend Peter Elias to develop a property portfolio to sell through Peter’s Allez-Francais on-line estate agency. Covering the North Dordogne and the South East of the Charente, I will be looking to take on good quality properties for sale and to give them the I-Spy360 treatment with a mixture of quality still photographs, virtual tours and floorplans.

The first property in my estate agent's portfolio

Things have got off to a good start and in the first ten days I have taken on instructions to sell two houses, both of them beautifully renovated old farmhouses. Now though, I have hit a bit of a roadblock.

The nature of all three of my businesses means that I need access to the internet. To get access to the internet I need a telephone line. And thanks to Orange/France Telecom, as I write this I have neither.

I alerted Orange to our pending house move on the 31^st August, six weeks ahead of time. Despite my protests that I would not be able to work without telephone or internet after we had moved out of the rented house in the middle of October, the earliest date they eventually promised to get me hooked up was 7^th November. I even wrote to the Chief Executive of Orange in France to complain about how his organisation’s poor service was impacting my business! He clearly took notice and I have now had several conversations with a customer service adviser who was personally allocated to my account. Whilst they were unable to act any faster than the 7^th November, she received reassurances from the contractors that everything would be resolved and I received confirmation that a technician would arrive at 10am.

The outcome was spectacular – we waited in all day on the 7^th and nothing happened!

I received a call from the contractor at about 6pm to say that they would not now be coming until the 9^th but would arrive at 8am. As I write this blog, on the 9^th, the technician has just arrived – it’s 10.30am!

If you are reading this blog and it is only mid November then you will know that he has got us successfully connected to the outside world and business as usual can recommence.

Project Cinquante comes to life

I always felt that one of the flaws in my plan would be that if we completed the move in the summer, finding a long term rental property could be a serious challenge. Why would anyone rent their house to me for €600 per month when they could get €600 per week if they let it as a gite over the summer months? And now we were going to be moving to France in June, right at the start of the summer season!

I trawled the internet for long term lets and my fears were realized – every property owner came back with a similar response – “yes, we’d love to rent our house to you, it will be available from September”.

So I tried another approach and contacted a number of the French estate agents in the Perigord Vert whose sites I had been bookmarking for several months. Bingo!

A photo received by email of our rental property in Busserolles

An email landed in my inbox from Nigel Barette of Piegut Immobilier. He had that day been asked by a client to find a tenant for a two bedroomed property in Busserolles, a small village situated bang in the middle of our property search area. A quick exchange of emails and a few photographs and the deal was struck – our initial base in France was sorted!

With a date and a destination fixed, the rest of the plan started to come together.

We booked our removals with Britannia Appleyard of Rotherham – they were the only company who seemed willing to come out and actually see what furniture we wanted to move before providing us with a quote. The others wanted to base their quote on an estimate of volume provided by yours truly. This seemed a risky route to go down as my ability to estimate volumes is, well, non-existent! I suspected we might end up either paying way over the odds or getting stung with penalty charges when they realized there was far more to load on a van than Mr. Morford had suggested.

Everything I had read suggested there were two things that would particulalrly infuriate me when trying to deal with French business processes – arranging a French bank account and setting up an internet connection. In reality, it could not have been easier to do either of these things. The secret lies in the fact that many Englishmen have gone before me and the amiable French have recognized that most of us are rubbish at speaking la francaise. As a consequence a number of French businesses have set up English speaking help lines and are no doubt capturing a big slice of the expat market as a consequence.

 Here are two examples that left me delighted me with the service from French organisations.

Coming from an agricultural background I was drawn to the idea of doing my banking with Credit Agricole. The Charente-Perigord division not only has an English speaking department it also has a slogan that appealed to my Yorkshire roots – “The Bank of Common Sense”.

You know, if there was a political party called the “Common Sense Party”, I’d vote for them – perhaps I should be the founding member and one day get I’d elected to the European Parliament? Maybe President of France? Anyway, back to Credit Agricole...

I gave them a call (and we’re still in Cheshire at this point) and spoke to a very nice lady called Marie Lambert. We exchanged some e-mails, I sent her copies of things like birth certificates and passports and we agreed to meet her as soon as we arrived in France. Marie’s office was over an hour away from Busserolles but that was not a problem she said, she would drive out and meet us at our local branch in Piegut. Far from being horrendous, this was proving to be real smooth sailing and I’ll tell you more about the lovely Marie in a later post.

So, to telephone and broadband. Nigel from Piegut Immobilier passed me the number for the English speaking customer service team at France Telecom (or Orange as they have now become) which is +33 (0)9 69 36 39 00

Once again I was blown away by the friendly and helpful manner in which my request was dealt with and within 10 minutes an order was placed for a landline, an ADSL broadband connection, a wireless router plus a TV package giving us access to 54 channels. All would be set up within a few days of our arrival and all the necessary equipment would be delivered to a local collection point. They were as good as their word and we have not had cause to fault them.