A question for anyone who has bought - or nearly bought - property in France.
Did you ever wish someone had flagged something before you signed?
I ask because I’m thinking of offering an independent investigation service for English-speaking buyers here, and I’d genuinely like to know whether it would have been useful to people in this group.
I’m Franco-British, born and raised in France. I’m a former local councillor, I teach technical English to construction and infrastructure engineers, and my wife and I have raised four children through the French education system. I’ve also bought and renovated seven properties personally, which means I have a reasonable eye for what a building is hiding and a fairly good sense of how French villages and towns actually work — not just how they look on a sunny afternoon in the listing photos.
The idea is that once a buyer has identified a property they’re serious about, I visit it and produce a detailed report in English covering everything from the structure and the diagnostics to the planning situation, the neighbourhood, the local amenities and the property’s history. I work independently — no relationship with any agent or notaire, no referral arrangements of any kind.
To find out whether this is genuinely useful, I’m happy to do two or three investigations for free for people in this group, preferably in Pays de Loire (Angers, Saumur, Nantes, Le Mans), in exchange for honest feedback.
Thanks for reading me, Chris
If you’re in the middle of a search and have something in mind, feel free to get in touch — or just share your experience below. Either would be helpful.
This reminds me of the US Home Inspection system, and in that sense it sounds like a great idea, and something people could find incredibly useful. My biggest concern would be that you’d likely have to be insured to the hilt ready for the first time someone comes a knocking saying “you said my home was great and now it’s subsided that badly half of it is in the salle de fêtes.” Ok, that might be a slightly extreme example, but it would concern me that your report that you and I know is purely informational may end up with some people looking to you in an attempt to blame someone for any issues that arise.
Thank you for this honest feedback @Porridge , no problem with bluntness, I asked for it!
I see the concern about qualifications, however:
a) you are only focusing on construction issues here. Surveys are not a thing here, true, yet a French study (Boursorama) found that nearly 7 in 10 buyers had at least one nasty surprise in their new home — and most of them had only visited the property once or twice. That number is almost certainly higher for foreign buyers who can’t easily get back for a second look. The main causes are 1) noisy neighbours, 2) bad insulation, 3) noise from traffic at rush hour.
All things that surveyors don’t look at. I am talking about checking the neighbors, the quality of schools, schools closing down, rights of way, hunters on your property on Sunday mornings, dirt bikes, nightclubs., medical services, burglaries etc. Looking at the building quality is only part of it, and surveyors, supposing you can get hold of one, will always add a disclaimer clause anyway.
Thank you for your reply though!
@kirsteastevenson I couldn’t agree more! I would have to be extremely careful and honest, but the idea is to point fingers at possible issues, not to resolve them.
Sounds like a really cool idea Chris and wish you well with it! as @kirsteastevenson says, make sure you can cover your backside and if you can, I’m sure newbies will find the hand holding very useful. :)
Personally, I think that the problem is that many buyers wear rose tinted glasses whereas I tend to look at a property from the viewpoint of what is wrong with it.
The other extremely important matter is what is the intended use of the property. The requirements for a second ‘holiday’ home are very different from those of a forever home where one intends to die. For the first option it is all about location in relation to the beach, and for the second, about the availability of local services.
A service that evaluated a property from the viewpoint of its intended use would probably be very useful to many people.
@Robert_Hodge Thanks. The first part of my work would indeed be a long conversation with the potential buyers, in order to establish their needs, both personal and professional. We happen to have moved a lot around France, and have been confronted with problems you couldn’t imagine. I mentioned hunters in the garden before and schools closing down, we’ve been there. We also found out once that an estate agent had forgotten to mention the nightclub across the road, closed for the summer and all fenced up. Imagine our surprise in September when people started urinating and vomiting on cars . I am convinced there is a need for this kind of investigation.
The initial idea sounds great - and that’s from someone who has just acquired a house stuffed with nasty surprises! But could your service have picked up on them? Some that we didn’t perhaps, but enough to make us change our decision to buy or enough to give us more negotiation power? Not sure.
Our big one was rising damp, obvious had it not been for the carefully positioned and well filled coat stand and newly cleaned floor. Would your service be getting owners to let you move furniture and sniff skirting boards? And if you didn’t spot it either then much easier to come back at you than go down the nightmare vice caché route.
Doing the range of investigations you suggest would be a huge time commitment along with everything else you mention so affordability could be an issue?
Many of those things tho’ are not static. And can be just fine until they’re not - new neighbour, new president of the Chasse, etc
So I’m not convinced about the idea. But the one phrase that did spark interest was the house’s history. Sitting in archives and deciphering ancient handwriting is not something we are good at, and would be prepared yo pay someone else!
Have you thought about how far you’re prepared to travel if you decide to offer this service? SF member are scattered far and wide; we’re in Narbonne and it’s nine or 10 hours from the Loire area. Also, you’d need an idea on charges.
I’m interested to know how you would know about night clubs and la chasse if you’re not local to where someone isi looking. When we bought our first house in France nearly 30 years ago, we were viewing in a seaside resort in September. This particular apartment block was next to a large public car park and I asked if it was useable in the summer, or similar. We already knew there is a fun fair that uses the whole of that car park, every summer for at least two months. The agent who was showing us the apartment denied all knowledge of the fun fair.
We stopped using the agent after that and looked for someone who was more honest.
Bit like two months of techno fest at La Barcares every summer. That put me off buying there when I was thinking of moving south plus all the other big events making it mayhem for residents and holiday home owners.
Oh yes the xmas festival for two months. People come from all over Europe and the holiday lets do very well. We go every year and spend a good three hours or more there as so much to see and its less than €10 entry. and its all free marshalled parking too with about ten mins walk to the entrance.The kids love the rides and there is an ice rink, cinema, tons of eating and drinking places of all different foods. Well worth the visit and the steamer Lydia which is beached behind the site used to be open to various artisanal crafts and puppet shows.
@JaneJones Thank you for your message. Rising damp is a common if not usual problem in old stone houses especially when limestone is involved. It is usually made worse due to cement rendering on the outside (there was a fashion to cover everything in cement after the war with the economic boom and aspirations for modernity. To answer your question, one of the first things I do when I visit a house is check the dampness of the walls with a very simple moisture tester so yes, there is a chance I would have seen it. It would be very risky to sue the seller for a “vice caché” if it was only a question of moving furniture during the visit, and you’d have to establish that the damp is actually preventing normal use of the building.
I failed to mention in my presentation that I didn’t only renovate 7 houses with my own hands, I have tenants in a few flats and I run a gîte near Angers. I have visited hundreds of houses and flats - starting again in two weeks for my daughter who will need a student flat .
Affordability - yes, that’s why I would start locally around Angers, (Pays de Loire , East Brittany and Lower Normandy) These are the regions I have lived in for the most of 50 years. Price is one thing, making sure you do your best to avoid surprises is another. There is a well known Latin quote that Notaires love: “Emptor debet esse curiosus” - the buyer MUST be curious. I would be offering to be curious on the buyer’s behalf.
As far as the unstatic issues as concerned, there are still lots of ways to investigate if you know where to ask and look.
Lastly, I was not referring to history of the house in terms of going to Archives départementales (I tried to do it for our first house which was a mill in Normandy, and got bored after sitting in the library looking at microfilms for hours). I was more along the lines of finding out how many times it had been bought and sold, for how much, and what work had been done on it (new rendering, divisions, demolitions etc).
I hope this answers your questions, don’t hesitate to get back to me and challenge the idea, I would be grateful.
@Jennifer11 Thank you for your reply. I would start in the Pays de Loire - Brittany - Normandy regions, places that I know particularly well.
French people usually hate administrative work, yet probably have the world’s most comprehensive legal procedures when it comes to establishing a business, changing the colour of a window, creating a new toilet or even cutting a hedge. No need to say there are public databases for everything, but getting to them can be time consuming and very challenging espaecially for non-francophone people.
Your example about the fun fair and the parking lot show how important it is to investigate well in the last stretch before signing anything, by asking the right questions to the right people.
The problem is not is fact so much about where I would offer the service, it would be to make it coincide with the Notaire’s calendar, let alone the Estate agent and the seller. This excludes, I think, highly volatile sectors like the riviera or the center of cities like Paris, Bordeaux or Lyon.
When I first read your post Chris, I dismissed it as unworkable but the more I have thought about it the more I think it has huge potential.
Your success depends entirely on your charisma. In retrospect, I would have paid for such a service when I bought my homes in France.
I use the word “home” because it is not just the bricks and mortar. There are qualified experts who can check that sort of thing (perhaps if you partnered with one it might give you an edge).
If you have the charisma to go round the surrounding areas and dig out the gossip, that would have been a useful service for me. I am not aware of any formal qualifications for this sort of service so you will have to build up a reputation. Your free offer to some SF members is a start. Make sure you check with @Cat (the owner of this forum) before pursuing commercial activities on the forum.
Neighbours are really important. We have fallen extremely lucky with our neighbours and they have made our life in France exceptional. Sure,they may change in the future but that is uncontrollable. We have some friends who have been less fortunate and their lives have been made miserable with aggressive or inconsiderate neighbours. There have been some examples of this, in the past, on this forum.
I can see lots of problems but non of them insurmountable. I wish you luck in your enterprise
On the face of it, it sounds like a great idea - @Mik_Bennett has a good point about teaming up with a surveyor (maybe one that is RICS qualified?) for the technical stuff.
And from many people’s experiences I’ve read on SF finding good local artisans is often a problem so that might be something you could help people with.
And yes do make sure that @cat (the owner of SF) is happy with you advertising for business! Good luck!
Which is why we’re not doing so! This is our third stone house in France so we know about lime. Unfortunately elsewhere the cement tanking then had another wall in front which was as dry as a bone, so a moisture meter may not have helped. But a good thing for people to have in their pocket.
Shame you get bored sitting in archives, so do we! Maybe I’ll find someone one day or summon up the patience.
Perhaps you should start at a smaller more affordable level and offer an accompaniment to the prospective purchasers’ second/third visit?
. I am convinced there is a need for this kind of investigation.
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