Is there a paid job which involves regularly checking and maintaining other people’s homes?
I’m an Englishman in the Lot since 2004 who, for better or worse, fulfilled his dream of renovating a grange, running a cattle farm, and B&B.
I’m now retired on a French farmers pension (€237pm) and am wondering if I might be able to supplement my pension by helping people to look after their résidence secondaire.
Does anyone have any experience in this area?
Thanks for your advice.
Yes it’s a thing. You have to be registered as an AE with a siret number and pay tax of course. But if in a holiday home destination you may well find owners crying out for help with changeovers if they rent their place out, or simply have someone prepare their home for their arrival.
This is justo e example
I did housecleaning for wealthy Parisiennes for over five years in the next commune before moving south. All above board, registered for CESU by the owners and paid by them into my account with monthly wage bulletin coming from URSSAF to keep and was all used in my French pensions. For a set number of hours per week/month yo do not need to be registered as an AE, just work under the CESU system whereby the employer gets a tax reduction. Obviously you need to be in a region that has second homes for the best chance. If you are finding it hard to survive on that pension and have nothing much else, you can apply to the CAF for ASPA if you own your own home and you can get upto a total of €1000/month but you do lose the property when you die apart from the first €39k of value, so if you have. no children depending on your for their inheritance, might be the way to go.
Yup, the homelikehome model was exactly what I was imagining.
Thank you for that.
So I guess the first thing would be to set up a website and publish services and charges.
I currently help out a uk couple near me on an informal basis, so maybe I could expand on that more formally with other maisons secondaire.
Thanks for the lead.
We had a similar business for 15 years until 2023, started off with just a couple of clients and capped it at 12/13 as we simply couldn’t cope with any more work, had a website from Day One and advertised on the likes of Anglo Info.
Thanks Tim,
Could I ask:
Your communication to prospective clients was uniquely through Xpat magazines and sites?
What was the location and radius of activity?
Why did you stop?
Many thanks
Richard
We were based in the Charente Maritime (Dept 17) and had a strict policy that we wouldn’t accept any clients who were more than 30 minutes away from home to cut down on the travelling. Most of the new business came through our website, we heavily used key words such as “property” and “maintenance” throughout the pages of the site which meant we were always in the top 10 sites that came up during a Google search of “property maintenance in the Charente Maritime”.
We moved back to the UK in 2023 and found suitable replacements for all of our clients before we left.
Thanks Tim for your feedback.
I’m going to try to give it a go I think!
Could I ask how you worked out your tariff?
Was it subscription or hours? Did you charge a travel fee? And so on?
We had several hourly rates for different types of work - general gardening and pool maintenance, gardening with powered equipment, pool cleaning with the robot, building work, housing cleaning, laundry per item (bed sheet etc) and so on. By looking at how much other businesses charged we gauged what our rates would be, travelling costs were built in. Clients were then given the option of a fixed monthly fee for a package of work or number of hours worked by our hourly rate which was adjusted every year depending on increased costs such as fuel.
Interesting thanks so much for your guidance.