Sometimes you can do well here. I paid £2000 (no misprint and includilng all taxes and the dollar premium as well) on my first house here, spending a total of about £10000 on it in terms of work) and have had 43 years of use of it which probably runs out at about £70 a visit of which I made four or so a year, but plus water, rates etc. I addition it's worth about 3 times my total investment and will be tax free so it's a pretty good deal! My residence is still within the market value range as I bought it as a ruin and then spent at least four times the purchase price on the house and garden. The garden is my luxury and I'm afraid the next owner may rip out my exquisite parterre, although it cost as much as the purchase price of the house!
Bought one for 8k and sold it for 25k, Vic, but take off the fees and some renovation work and I only doubled my money :-(
I bought our first house here in Finisterre in about 2,000 & sold it about 6 years later with a "profit" of 66%. My present house was bought for the same price I paid for the first & I have spent about 50% of the purchase price on renovations. I'm extremely happy with the housing market here. Houses in our sector seem to be selling for about 200/250,000 dependant on land etc. I have a fabulous house in the country with 3 Ha of ground, barns, stables & other outbuildings with the bonus that it costs me less to live here than it would in GB. Oh yeah! just remembered : I bought our first house at 1.57 euros to the pound. I'm staying :-)
In our area of Brittany (the Mont's d'Arree) which is pretty isolated there are many Brits. About 30-40% are permanent residents, nearly all retired. Many came here after selling their UK home and bought cheaper homes to retire here and hopefully invested some of the spare funds into investments to subsidise their pensions. Virtually no house, however large, has sold for over 250,000 euros in our commune. Most go for just over about 100,000. If you are buying an old house (which the Bretons don't do very often but incomers French or British or whatever may do) it's very important not to spend too much on buying or on refurbishment. For those sellling out of the "dream" I would think most make a loss, sometimes substantial. Several have actually abandoned their homes or let them fall down (a few). A few drowned their sorrows and ended their days in France. A Brit who died had his house repossessed by a bank as his English family were not interested. Another left after being denounced to the fisc for income tax evasion by an annoyed ex(last seen in Thailand). I have been here since '72 and reckon I'm still ahead of the game but not massively so. I have a let cottage which actually achieves a slightly better yield than some investments in London which cost about 25 times as much. My own home is large enough and I love it and would be worth a million or more in the home counties, but here it's worth maybe 120,000 euros. Don't come to France and expect to make money on property (I've been telling this to people for 35 years). I don't want to go back to the UK and live in a windswept East Anglian mobile home park as some Brits from here have just done. Capital appreciation as in London recently seems a million miles away. I was part of all that long ago, but like Barbara Deane, one enjoys the life one has now. This morning I have spent all morning helping to organise the village fete and next week end I am co-organiser of a vide grenier with added live music! If you are in Brittany come- 6 July SCRIGNAC 29460!
Quite right. There is a house on my OH's books where the people who inherited it in the UK are looking at how much it cost, overlooking the fact it needs a lot of repairs and modernisation (sanitation and drainage, or it cannot be sold, the usual things) and turning their noses up at the only offer they have had since it has been on the market. They want at least 100k above the purchase price based on their experience of UK prices where they live but 'shaving off' a bit. In reality it is worth about 100k less than the purchase price, plus it would need approaching the same again on top for the work. Would anybody in their right mind really in effect give away 200k when there are plenty more houses on the market that are cheaper and in a better condition? However, try convincing them that.
Tony, I think Ben has painted a good picture as to what is happening over here with property prices, i will just add my take on it, based on the north of the lot-et-garonne area.
I will use actual figures rather than percentages because there are areas of variation in my examples,all figures are net of fees.
We purchased our house in 2003 and paid 600k euros, in 2009 we decided to buy and move into a working farm,we placed in on the market for 675k the valuation at the time. we had quite a few viewings back then but no firm offers, then the viewings just kept getting less and less, so we kept reducing the price on the advise of all the agents that where trying to sell it for us we are now down to 450k euros and one agent advised us to reduce it to 400k euros to stand any chance of selling it, the sale of this house was intended to play a large part of our retirement income, sometimes the best thought out plans do not always work.
We have some friends who brought their house the same time has us in the same area, things did not work out very well for them, they paid 150k euros in 2004 they have just sold it for 108k euros they are moving back to the uk gutted.
I know of a lot more stories like these, the people concerned have come to terms with the fact that they now do not have a choice anymore and are making the most of their lives here in france.
Thanks David. Professionally I have included China, Brazil and India as 'case studies' since I co-wrote a book published in early 1989. I have continued to look at the three particularly but use Infant Mortality Rates (IMR) as the indices because of what I do. That looks at how many children per thousand die in infancy, which is to say before primary school age as a rough guide. Despite being IMR, the UN and other bodies who collect data to rank countries list them by child survival, so best at the top. In the 1980s nobody would have thought that China would ever overtake the UK for the survival rates seen as how many per 1000 live, but they now have risen to 88 in the world from very near the bottom of the 188 countries listed and are climbing fast, the UK is now down to 25, France is ninth. Since 2000, China and Brazil have almost halved IMR, India had peaks and troughs but is doing well enough, the UK improved by just over 1:1000 and France started out with low IMRs in 2000 which it has improved measurably in real terms, something in the direction of a roughly 28% improvement, or just over one child death in four less, which is very big.
So along with GDP and other indicators, one sees that whatever politicians of any colour claim in the UK they are floundering and formerly developing nations catching up. In Europe, say what one likes but Spain, Greece, Italy and Slovenia are among the ones people will assume are not places to be but they are higher than the UK. They were not two decades ago. France has improved exponentially over four decades and ranks as one of the leading countries in the world. Economically perhaps it is not an enormous difference but measured by two decades of growth Brazil should overtake the UK within five years, France in a decade and India will be about level with the UK in a decade.
OK, science is blinding and all that, but it does knock the legs out from under any argument that returning to the UK is beneficial. Given the average house price is now £250,000 and the North-South divide does exist. With some former three bedroom council flats having sold for over £2 million (!!!!) in the London suburbs as a guide price, property is itself no incentive to go back. Bradford is one of the cheapest places, nice enough but the weather is nothing to write home about, but would that city welcome or accommodate several hundred thousand returning ex-pats, as too the Humberside region or Rhondda in Wales? Do people want to huddle together where they probably have no desire to go anyway?
I find that the author of this piece seems to be patching together anecdotal evidence rather than looking at hard facts, the state of the two nations in question in real terms, and not based on what he used. I, for example, care about my health. With NHS cutbacks and it being sold off on the cheapo bit by bit, shortages of personnel and so on, would I want to be there? No thanks. When all such factors are taken into account then of course there are other countries one might choose, but France knocking appears largely an ill informed pastime by people who should have better things to do.
that's when I tell them "je vous laisse la chercher" and I serve the next customer ;-)
Have you noticed how the previous customer always seems to be taken by surprise when the realize that they are going to have to pay for their purchases and spend several minutes searching bags and purses for that elusive Carte Bleu?
you're welcome, Tony ;-)
exactly
That was good.
the drop has been different from area to area too. certain may have seen 35% drop since 2007/8 where others have been less, see here for info. Many ex-pats have come unstuck buying in the middle of nowhere from other foreigners at artificially high prices (a sort of ex-pat market that runs parallel and above the local market) then when the supply of expats runs out they're hit by a double wammy - they paid too much/the expat priced market no longer exists and the locals may well not be interested as it's too far from work/employment opportunities :-(
Tony's hit the nail on the head - it would be rude to the existing customer because you haven't finished with them. It can be used to get the message across that someone's taking way too long and is now in the way (I use that one a lot in my tabac when someone's blocking everyone else!) Secondly, many are way past bac, a friend is a physio and his wife (bac+3) works on the check-out as it's the only thing she can find and many others are in the same boat (although they're not all tatooed and there are also those who only have the brevet too)
Our hôtesses are really well trained. They totally ignore you until the previous customer has picked up their last item of shopping and paid and been sent away with a handful of assorted till slips and special offer-tokens and a farewell appropriate for the time of day. Then she suddenly notices your presence, switches on the smile and bids you "Bonjour." But she is probably thinking, "I passed the Bac. you know. I worked hard for that. I deserve something better than this shitty job. Shall I get myself another stud, or should I go for a tattoo?"
Would you like to verify that Mike. From what I have read what Doreen is doing is sticking her fingers in the corners of her mouth extending her lips thereby in order to make an approximation of a smile. Which is a pretty dumb thing to do. She might more usefully say to the hôtesse something like " je compris. Vous bossez tous le jour sans remerciement. C'est dur mais il vous faut sourire"
Sorry about the previous typo. So don't make inferences based on imagination Doreen.
I would say this is a pretty accurate figure. Yes, based on about five friend’s houses. Of course this is not statistically significant. But the whole house price model is different in France. There are circa 2 million empty houses in France. The whole market inflation model does not exist outside Paris.
That's the spirit, well wine in your case, here's to you!
If I make no mhistake I think that there are a few too many insults are flying around here. Spelling mistakes aren't such a huge issue these days although we may regret how society has gone. I have certainly met as much rudeness from shop assistants in the UK as in France, and shome of them have been as ugly the next day. It's probably more a generational shing than some of us would like to admit, however much that may go against the grain.
All together everybody, tongues out and nja, nja na nja-nja then having done that shall we all have a refreshing G and T?