Category: Garden

After 6 months looking and 3 months extremely focused and intensive (15 hours per week) house-hunting we have finally bought our new home in the Dordogne!  Voici ‘La Girouette’……

Anyone who has bought a home in France knows that the system here is very different to the UK/Ireland.  For starters there are no big centralised property search engines that all the immobiliers (estate agents) register their properties on.  There are dozens of different websites many of which are difficult to navigate and have poor search terms.  Next, hardly anyone puts up “A Vendre” (For Sale) signs so you have no idea which houses are actually on the market.  After all our searching we genuinely believe that maybe 1 in every 5 houses in the Dordogne must be on the market.  The number of properties for sale here is just staggering so you can spend literally weeks trawling through websites trying to find houses which match your criteria.

Then once you do find one which looks good and ticks the boxes on paper you have to try to find out where it is.  “Proche d’un village” (near to a village) can mean anything up to 10 kms from the local village and, even then, that village might have no boulangerie or any other shops because there are many, many ‘dead’ villages in the area.  The estate agents’ descriptions of locations are deliberately vague because they don’t want people to go to the owners directly for a private sale.  Given that the agent’s charge a massive 5-6% of the selling price in fees, you can understand that they might want to safe-guard that income by being as cagey as possible.  However, for the house-hunter this makes life very difficult and the whole process incredibly slow because you have to arrange a viewing of every single property which might vaguely be of interest even though you have no idea if it is on a main road or right beside a factory!  Continue reading “Home Sweet Home!”