So how do you go about finding your dream house in France. As most of us know buying a house in the UK is hard enough. A few years ago we moved from London to Brighton, not a vast distance but finding a house was a nightmare.

As we worked during the week we could only view properties at the weekend, so that meant one day of viewings! The market was moving so quickly that houses were being sold a few hours after going on the market. After a day of viewing 15 properties you hardly knew what you had seen and all of the houses merged into one!

We eventually found a beautiful flat near the sea, got an offer accepted and arranged a survey. We got a phone call from our surveyor saying that he was at the property and there was another surveyor there, did we want to continue with our survey? No!!! That was the end of that purchase and the nice surveyor didn’t even charge us a penny. After another house fell through at exchange, due to the fact that the seller was selling to two parties at the same time, we eventually found our current lovely home.

So what about trying to find somewhere in a different country. Well luckily the whole process is a little bit slower in Brittany and the French buying system is geared towards protecting the purchaser. We started on the Internet, finding estate agents (Immobiliers) that dealt in properties in Brittany. In this wonderful world of the world wide web it is amazing how much property you can find on-line without leaving the comfort of your own armchair. We also found a lovely property for sale privately. It was this house that actually started our serious house hunt.

You can find properties through Estate Agents, Notaires and directly from the owner. Generally speaking the costs go down, so the Estate Agent is the most expensive, Notaires cheaper and buying directly from the owner has no additional fees on top. This is excluding the Notaires fee for the actual property purchase as you will have to pay that which ever route you go through and these fees are set by the government.

So why bother with estate agents, well it’s the same as in the UK, they do provide a service and the ones we have dealt with provide an excellent service. They are also insured and many have bonds, which means that they can accept your deposit and no matter what happens you will not lose your money. Fraud in France is dealt with very severly, so as long as you check that they have all the relevant registrations you should be fine and can make your purchase with confidence.  

The first thing we did was buy a detailed map of Northern Brittany, so that we could tell where places actually were! We then decided on an area we wanted the house to be within. As this was our first serious house hunt we chose a small area focused on where we really wanted to be. We decided that if we didn’t find anything suitable on the first trip out in this area we could expand our area and look again.

We then started with a list of things to think about so that we could categorise all of the properties we found on the Internet, which as seems to be with most things, ended up turning into a spreadsheet:

• Agent
• Price – does it include agency fees
• Location- where is it near, what amenities, restaurants etc.
• Floorspace – A lot of sites don’t give you a good idea of individual room sizes but most give total square metres
• Bedrooms – how many does it really have, is that a bedroom on the ground floor or really a dining room, how would you use it
• Extendability – is your family expanding, or your budget small, maybe buy somewhere smaller now and extend later
• Garden – how large and is it connected, a lot of gardens aren’t actually adjoining to the property
• Outbuildings- do you need any, what condition are they in, will they actually be a hindrance to you if they are in bad condition and about to fall down
• General Condition – how much work does it need and how much can you put in
• Best Point – what is the most memorable thing about the property to help differentiate it from the millions of others you’re looking at
• Worst Point – what puts you off, is it enough to stop you buying
• Web Link to the property – make sure you can find it again

We ended up with quite a long list and so we grouped the houses by Agent. We then marked the houses that we really must see. That gave us quite a good list of Agents who had the sort of property we wanted in our price range and we could move on to arranging the viewings.

It is very common in France for properties to be listed with multiple agencies so you will see the same property on the web through multiple agents, some with different prices. This price difference is usually because the fees are not included on one and are on another, or the owner has dropped the price but hasn’t told all of the agents that are listing their property.  

So what do you have to think about before you even arrange to see a property with an agent:

• Budget – Obviously but it is amazing how this gets a little stretched as you look around, that’s even before you leave your own home, let alone once your with an experienced sales person showing you your dream house for only a few thousand euros beyond your top budget
• Location- Being by the sea is more expensive, what do you really want and what can you actually afford
• Type of Property- Do you want a character cottage or a more modern house
• Amount of Work Required – Be realistic, do you want to spend the next 10 years renovating a place or try managing local artisans from afar
• Extendability – Do you need somewhere that in future could have more bedrooms or has outbuildings for future expansion
• Garden – Looking after a garden from afar costs money, how big a garden do you really need
• Rent-ability – Are you going to rent it out, if so, how will it look in photographs as that is all your guests can go on, does it have the wow factor

Hopefully these little pointers will get you thinking. This stage is fantastic fun and it can certainly start taking over your evenings as you surf the web looking at endless properties. Make sure you stick to your budget, don’t forget about those fees and don’t take on a wreck thinking that in 2 weeks you’ll turn it into a palace or that when you get to France you’ll suddenly develop building skills to rival Bob the Builder even though you’ve only ever put a shelf up at home.

Once you’ve got a shortlist you can start to arrange your viewings trip.

2 Bedroom Gite in Brittany

Buying, Owning and Running a Gite in Brittany Blog

©Derek Arkwright 2007