Any one read the article in the Daily Mail re French holiday home stolen and it has taken 8 Years and £150,000 to get it back.
Sadly this means an immediate ‘no’ to the question
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Daily Mail ? 
Presumably a holiday home in an area where locals have been priced out of the market, so some-one squatted in it. And the British people didn’t have enough knowledge and language skills to get them out more quickly… It’s a horrible thing to happen, to be sure, but I’m sure the paper milked it as much as they could.
I did a quick search and every reference I could find to the story was linked to the Daily Mail who have a history of selective reporting and (shall we say) imaginative journalism. I wonder if any other news media have reported this story independently?
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Well I, on occasion read most papers online you don’t have to pay for and subscribe to another(very cheaply)
I did briefly read the article in the Mail and I think they were an Anglo/French couple who after living in one of the houses converted them to gites when they returned to the wife’s home area on the Isle of Man.
haven’t seen the article elsewhere.
Brian if you put this into Google 8 years to remove french scwatters in France you will find much coverage including Le Monde and S.V.F. From 2017 on changes to the law. and actions the Government is taking
the reason I posted was to draw attention to the fact if you have 48 hours to act then you are on your own as this couple found.
Sorry - still no results. It would be most helpful if you could post the links as I’d like to learn more about this. Thanks 
If its the same people, they had a building business near Carhaix back in the 90’s, I remember the surname and the lady had the same christian name too. Unfortunately squatters are getting everywhere now and brits are finding them in their spanish holiday flats/houses too under the guise of homes for spanish and not foreigners.
Do you have a link for that? My understanding (which may be out of date) is that you can raise a complaint any time. Obviously the sooner the better of course. And it is the préfecture that has 48 hours to respond to you.
We passed a house in Carpentras a month or so back that was being evicted - so it does happen.
The opposite as I understand it, your information is up to date, the information given by the woman is out of date, I’m sure things changed a few years ago to make these sorts of situations far easier than they previously were.
I ‘took one for the team’ and struggled over to the terrible daily mail website which is so full of hideous code and pop ups and videos my MacBook is probably infected with the satanic ghost of Paul Dacre until the end of eternity, but the headline figure is misleading as far as I can tell, she’s spent about 10k € on legal fees, the rest up to the 150k was in “lost rent” which is obviously unquantifiable since she may not have a had paying tenants much of that time, she says herself that she had a tenant in one house when she first left to live on the Isle of Man, and that person left after a few months, I’ve no idea what the market is like at that place but who knows whether she’d have had many takers?
None of which is discounting the huge cleanup expenses to get the houses back into a good state, I’m very sympathetic, but as always it gives a distinct hint that perhaps she’s over-egging the pudding when if she’d just stuck to the facts it’s horrendous enough as it is. She pleads poverty and that’s reasonable enough but if one of your primary assets in life was being destroyed, you, or at least I, would beg steal, borrow, sell a kidney, Rob a bank, whatever to get the money together to get the lawyers on the case sooner rather than later. Perhaps there has been more happening that is not explained in the article but it reads that between 2015 and 2018 she did nothing other than go there occasionally and ask them to leave (having presumably tried the authorities and not had much luck), then in 2018 she hired an incompetent lawyer who did eff all, then last year (2022 presumably) she FINALLY got another more competent one and within months she had one back and is about to get the other. She got a decent lawyer on the case and things moved pretty fast, had she done that earlier perhaps she wouldn’t have had such a long ordeal and such a horrific stressful time.
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" Fac Fortia Et Patere" - Rather you than me me!
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8 years to remove french squatters in France . Brian this is what I typed into google and it worked again but I cannot get svf to accept the page.
Ref SVF it is shown as September 2017 .
Re 48hrs that is clearly shown in the Daily Mail article headline.
Bian this may help .
This link is from the google page.
It should be easy:
1 copy the link
2 come to your post on SF and just paste the link into your message.
The board software will do everything else.
So if I paste “htt ps: //www.service- public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F35254” but without the spaces I inserted in the link, it turns into this:
Unless, of course, there is a hidden setting that forbids linking to Daily Mail articles 
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https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=french%2Bsquatters%2Bin%2BFrance
Bevor Sie zur Google Suche weitergehen
Sorry, we were unable to generate a preview for this web page, because the following oEmbed / OpenGraph tags could not be found: description, image
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=french%2Bsquatters%2Bin%2BFrance
The link does work, the ‘unable to generate a preview’ is common vor some websites.
In the link provided, the only other link to the specific case I can see is from the Express, who are of a similar ilk to the daily mail. Lots of links about changes in the law around around squatting, and some about Paris being a particular issue.
From what I’ve read… the Law has been changed …
Back in 2020: Under current French law, holiday homeowners have 48 hours after squatters move in to prove that the property belongs to them and that the intruders broke in.
Fast Forward:
Tuesday 06 July 2021
The law has been toughened to enable homeowners in France to obtain speedy eviction of squatters from their property, but only provided the préfet agrees.
2022:
2023:
The new French Law about squatting is being contested… as being unfair to disadvantaged people… etc etc
There’s lots of Press coverage but the Law (which NOW favours the Property Owner) is still in-place at the moment…
That is the precise link I posted as an example to help you. And my name is Brian, not Bian.
The DMail article tells about a sad situation which happened some years ago…
That is not an isolated case…
and, as I’ve posted, the Law has now been changed… too late for those other folks unfortunately.
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