I was looking through this forum, as a visitor, and liked what I saw so here I am. What initially drew me was the frustrating problem regarding the lack of interest by Immobiliers and the difficulties in finding serious interest in my property that I have for sale. So what I'm asking is can anyone help/advise me to obtain the quick sale I now require to move house back in U.K.?
My house has been on the market for two years and we have had several viewings arranged through French-Property.com, Leggett Immobilier, Frenchentree, and my own website at www.roberthroberts.com, but no success so far. We are in the process of moving house in the U.K. and now need some of the capital that would be released through selling our house in France to help finance this move. We thought we had allowed enough time to sell (two years) but are now getting quite desperate!
Any constructive advice will be most appreciated. I have added the links to the house on the sites I've mentioned incase anyone wants to voice an opinion. Thanks for all help.
http://www.french-property.com/f/p/nv/pmn/120000/pmx/130000/bdr/3/s/p/o/a/lcl/98/
www.frenchentree.com/property-for-sale/details/40300_mnl_000000/reduced-your-dream-home-awaits-in-gracay-18310-france!
www.roberthroberts.com
http://www.frenchestateagents.com/french-property-for-sale/view/49184AGO18/house-for-sale-in-gracay-cher-centre-france
Bonjour Robert,
Your problem is not new, nor is it only yours.
The market for property in the French countryside is dead. For a number of reasons:
1. Prices are still falling. No one wants to be the 'Dindon de la farce' and purchase a property which will be even cheaper next month.
2. The market has been flooded with thousands of French second homes, sold off by Parisians and city-dwellers fed up with high taxes and running costs.
3. Brexit has ensured that the British market is on hold.
4. Not many people want to live in the country: they want to move to where the work is, in the big towns and cities.
5. You may be looking at the wrong market: UK buyers represent less than 0.6% of property sales in France. It's the French who are buying at the moment ... and they don't look at Leggett's sites.
I am an estate agent and see situations like yours every day. There are no quick fixes. You could look into letting your property as a gite over the summer months while you move back to the UK. This would bring in a few bob and, ultimately, increase the attraction of your property if sold later as a 'going-concern'.
But, in the meantime, stick an ad on leboncoin.fr to really find out if your price is right. If it is, you should sell within the month. If you don't, then your price is too high.
Robert, it's the French who are going to buy your property.
Dare I say your website could use a little work Robert. The home page has not even been indexed by google from the looks of it.
I'm not a web designer in any shape or form, so any suggestions that you can give me to improve the website will be most welcome!
Leggett have already got it on Leboncoin.fr.............. with their commission added of course!
Where to start ?
Firstly, to call it a 'dream home' is a tad OTT. For the right people it could be ok. The 'right people' in your case would be Brits looking for a holiday home for a small family or young local French looking to get into the housing market though at that price you will be lucky to get much interest.
As Simon says, the UK market is pretty quiet at the moment tho' I think it will pick up quite quickly if the UK stays in the EU. The French market is quite busy generally for 'habitable' properties up to about 100K€ even if they are a bit isolated. Young French are being offered decent bank loans etc to buy rather than rent so I would suggest this is your market to aim for.
I would put your place with local French agents to give yourself the best chance.
You need to have your website in French as well as English, given the market, and it needs a summary (village house, 3 beds, land area etc). The Brits may come back after we vote to remain, but if Brexit wins, they will be rarer than hens teeth. Good advice for Le Bon Coin. Try RightMove overseas too (but watch out for their rolling contract, take 6 months and remember to cancel) but crucially place it with your notaire. The French dislike agency fees and tend to look at the notaire's site first. I tried the French Property exhibition and didn't get a single call but Right Move generated the most. Then I decided to stay! My site is still up if you want to look www.chezcaroline.net Good luck.
For web design i could give you a few pointers.
1. Use relative rather than absolute size references, on my 800*600 monitor it is virtually unreadable
2. Dont stretch images, they become pixelated.
3. Add some pictures to your description, one look at the page of text with nothing to see makes me not even want to start reading it.
4. Lower the quality of some of the pictures in your pictures page, it takes an age to load, i would go for thumbnails that when clicked load the full size image.
5. Don't include a google maps widget unless its actually calibrated to point at the property, it loads into Pheonix...
6. "in price to sell!ype your paragraph here."
7. Maybe give home.html a higher priorty over the other pages and a more frequent change than the other pages in sitemap.xml
not trying to discredit it too much the content is there could just do with some tweeking, If you want some pointers feel free to message me, I reckon it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to knock it into shape.
