How To Find Your Perfect Property In France

Summary: We take a mix of traditional property hunting methods with online research to create the perfect recipe for French property success

The continuing growth of websites promoting and selling property in France should make it a whole lot easier for you to narrow down your must see list and to locate your ideal French property. However, it can actually lead to greater confusion for the foreign property buyer. Often prices seem to fluctuate wildly, descriptions seem vague and it can be difficult to create that all essential must view property list.

Are we at risk of becoming too dependent on the web for our property inspiration? Do we expect more answers on-line than are currently available?  We take a mix of traditional property hunting methods with on-line research to create the perfect recipe for French property success.

First and foremost before going on-line and browsing through thousands of beautiful and not so beautiful websites and their latest French property listings step back a pace and decide exactly what it is you’re looking for. Build up as clear detail as you possibly can of exactly what it is that you’re in the market for, an apartment, a villa, a château, rural, in a village or in a city. What condition do you expect the property to be in are you willing to consider a renovation, and most importantly your budget.  Get this down on paper and don’t be easily distracted by clever marketing, if you’ve set your heart on a country cottage don’t get pulled away when you see glossy material for an amazing new complex, stick with what you know you really want and don’t allow smart marketing to muddy the waters.

Rather than just viewing properties on-line research to find the names of the agents and property specialists in the locations that are of most interest to you, contact these people directly with your requirements often their websites do not contain all listings or the latest properties to come to market and you may risk not finding out about the best properties as they can often sell before they even get lined up in the queue for inclusion on the company web site.

Find out more about the agency, what are their rates, often properties are listed with multiple agencies and varying rates can mean that the same property could actually be less costly with one agent than another purely because of his rates.

Build up a profile of agents that you would like to visit in the locations that you’re most interested in, give them as much detail as you can about the type of properties you’re most interested in viewing, and plan your visit accordingly. Finally don’t go it alone, any property purchase is a major undertaking and there should be no ambiguity or confusion during the buying process, if you’re not a fluent French speaker and don’t have a good understanding of the French property buying process you could well save yourself a great deal of time, frustration and potentially money by using the services of an independent French property specialist whose expertise will make far lighter work of what can be a very complex and sometimes daunting legal process for the uniformed non French speaking foreigner. 

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