Just received a frantic call… from our Mairie … the postman is trying to deliver an important letter to a Brit (?)… do I recognize the name…??? - Nope !!
Please can I suggest that if you buy a property in France… make sure your name is clearly marked on the letterbox… which should be easily available/highly-visible for postal deliveries. (generally by the roadside on your boundary… but not always)
Also… visit your local Mairie and let them know that YOU are the new owner of XYZ…
check with them to ensure you do know the correct Postal Address of the property you have bought… and make sure the address shows correctly on all Utilities etc etc
the Mairie might well point you in the direction of other official bodies… always useful.
Likewise… if you Sell your propertyin France… please do ensure that provisions are made for all mail to reach you… wherever you may be hiding…
I don’t know how far this exists, but here in the South Correze they are finally giving new ‘full’ addresses and plates to put on gates etc. These will be Official here by November, and we have received notification of their status. They are mainly putting numbers and street names to hitherto un-named ones, so they might not be the ones you are used to - ours most certainly is almost totally new. We believe these are now used on GPS but not too sure.
Accompany,g the Norification is also the list of people you MUST advise of the changes, which include all the Governmental ones plus services, banks etc.
Check with your Maire for details of your area.
Forgot to add the obvious (?) - all your personal contacts and including online retailers you use - Amazon, Book sellers, eBay and of course PayPal if you have an account. IF the delivery address is wrong - you won 't get your stuff even if the old address you are using might work temporarily.
Getting the correct postal address seems like it should be easy, but we’ve already found it can be tricky - the property we are buying has a ‘name’ and two street numbers, but the ‘name’ is actually now linked to separate farm round the corner (and there are road signs with the name on that lead you there) and we can only assume that as the house we are buying was the maison d’maitre, the name was once for this house (with all farms and estates beyond covered by this) and now the farm has been sold off, the name is no longer attached to Maison d’Maitre. Yet…the contracts we’ve signed had the ‘name’ on them, and there are letters in the house addressed with just the name and no street number…when we queried this with the agent, we discovered that due to the sales being made up of lots of small bundles, there are multiple possible addresses! We did find the tax documents had a numbered address on it, though, and were assured that this must be the official address for the house if its a tax document! But, we are going to check with the Mairie and also talk to the neighbours at the farm bearing the name that matches our address to ensure there is no confusion and that any mail sent to the wrong address gets passed on. I am envisioning complications though…best case scenario is we’ve accidentally also bought the farm…!!!
For those who are talking about the “new style”… yes, that’s coming out… gradually, gradually…
what I am talking about is, for example…
the person who thinks their address is XYZ… with either the incorrect (or absent) lieu dit…
and even worse… the completely wrong commune…
and ever worserer… and worserer… the completely wrong postal town
(that’s a classic… one chap wasted all his newly printed business cards… 'cos he’d put the wrong town… and he couldn’t figure out why nothing found him… until I pointed out what he had done wrong… )
Great… go and check with the Mairie… and get the letterbox clearly named… also… if you see the Postman nearby… explain who you are and exactly where you live
I’ve just checked and my postal address is not the same as the “numbered address or the parcel no” on the property tax document
We got an official postal address about five years ago and I still have the letter setting out the format of our address. I like to think that for at least six centuries the lack of address wasn’t a problem.
However, like everyone else whom I’ve spoken to in our commune , I don’t understand the basis of our recently assigned house number. We are number 70, our neighbours are 60 and 80, but then subsequent numbers leap into the several hundreds!
More problematically, our road, the D840, is now l’avenue de Gabariers, which doesn’t appear to appear on any courier’s satnav. Although la poste know where we are, no-one else does, so whenever a courier is about to deliver, we get a call on an invariably crackly portable (that’s another, different gripe) and I have to shout down the phone, Nous sommes une centaine de mètres après l’église en direction de Capdenac
Ours is the number of metres from where our road ends (ie meets the “main” road). So we have a number two thousand and something. Our nearest neighbour going back towards the main road has a number in the one thousands.
On our side of the road the numbers are even.
Getting the road name on sat nav just takes time. Our commune’s road names do now appear on Google.
Thanks very much indeed, that’s really enlightening and makes some sort of sense (even though I think other countries may have better numbering solutions)
We’ve only been waiting five years for our road name to appear on couriers’ satnavs.
Yes, I think this is generally how the numbering system works in rural areas. We are 2498 which makes life easier as I can tell people to do two and a half kilometres from the roundabout…
That s correct - the number of metres from an ‘official or proper road’ My sister-in-law has a house that was the only one in view, and when the new plate arrived she found she was street number 993! same with us in Burgundy where there was a bifurcation just 50 metres from our door and our neighbour was something like 200, whilst we were 46 purely because we were on one arm and they were on the other! In all hoestry thugh it does help as some delivery services simply don’t deliver here as ‘we are not on GPS’ The house has been here for over 300 years which counts for nothing! Never a problem for La Poste though.
)
