FINDING A HOUSE IN FRANCE: FIRST STEPS #2

 

First, be advised. I am not an expert in anything except my own experiences. And my experiences are confined to a particular time and place. If you have issues, I welcome them in Comments.

We've been house hunting in Herault on several occasions since 2003. (Herault is a French department, somewhere between an American county and a state.) We twice visited to find a holiday home from which to learn about and explore the region. After deciding that this region of France was where we wanted to settle in our retirement, another search led to our current home of seven and a half years. And recently, we searched for a home with broader, gentler stairs given the state of our old bones. So I do speak from experience. As always, my advice is free of charge and worth every penny.

There's no multiple listing service in France. Each agent has their own website and, while some agencies do cooperate with partner agencies, it can easily be the case that there is a house for sale next door to the one that you are viewing that fits your requirements, but there's no sign out front (There are seldom street signs in our region.) and your agent doesn't have a clue. That's one reason to employ a more scattershot strategy than you might in the USofA.

The internet is your friend and there are multiple ways to take advantage of what the internet has to offer.

Once you have picked a region, do a simple Google search. And yes, even though you will be searching in France, such search terms as 'real estate Languedoc' or 'real estate Herault' work just fine. You can even take it down to an individual town . You'll get a bunch of hits - pages and pages. Take the time to poke through several of them and you will be rewarded. Fortunately for those without working French, most of the sites do translate into English. Eventually, if you expend time and effort, you will learn which sites seem to handle the type of properties most suited to your requirements. You may notice that some agencies update their websites frequently, some not so much. Decide for yourself what that might indicate.

In addition to the sites of real estate agencies, there are FSBO sites - For Sale By Owner. leboncoin.fr is the French equivalent of Craigslist, everything that can be sold privately (and legally) appears, sortable by type, price, region, and more. Agencies also post on leboncoin, so it's not exclusively private sales. You'll need at least beginner French to get through it properly. Here's how our ad looks. The site for Green Acres is similar, with both FSBO and agency ads. View the ads carefully. A private sale that doesn't include an agency fee may have more wiggle room in the price.

And then there's Facebook. Lots of pages and groups cater to anything and everything for sale as well as sites that are specific to real estate, to French real estate, to French houses in a specific region, to French houses under 50,000, and so on. My brief and recent experience tells me that Facebook is becoming very popular for both sellers and buyers. Whether you like or hate Zuck, his Frankenstein monster is hard to ignore. 

Never undersetimate word of mouth. Bakeries, butchers, supermarkets, and other high traffic venues often allow the posting of community announcements. Tabacs, the only stores allowed by law to sell cigarettes and other tobacco products in France, can be important community gathering places. The folks in the mairie, the city hall, usually have a pretty good handle on what's going on in their town. And in the village squares and in cafes, there are likely to be men and women who will be happy to engage with a stranger, even one with fumbling French, as long as the effort is sincere.

In sum, if you are looking to buy a house in France, there are multiple avenues available to assist you. Make a list of your requirements - important questions from buyers in our region include the nature of the outside space, is there a garage or available parking nearby, distance to local services, and such. Let your contact know how important those requirements are. Stick to your guns. And get to it. 

A journey of a thousand miles begins with having enough RAM.

SELLING OUR HOUSE IN FRANCE: TRUE STORY #1

 Transacting business in France is always an interesting undertaking. 

Don't get me wrong. I am not one of those sourpusses who has moved to France and complains that French people live there. But French people do have ways of doing things that do not often correspond to the way that I am accustomed to doing business. We are selling our home of seven years in order to finance the move to a house more suitable to our age and old bones. (Links and pics below.) We'll have fewer, more gentle stairs to climb. More room to display, store, repair, and otherwise deal with the stuff we've accumulated over those years. We're talking about multiple opportunities for cross-cultural misunderstanding. Take the case of applying to our French bank for a mortgage.

I won't go into numbers. But I walked into the meeting with the young, casually dressed banker hoping to borrow about 40% of the cost of buying the new house. (It's strange calling a house built over 1,000 years ago a 'new' house.) I documented our income through a combination of French and American tax returns. We went over the payoff of our current mortgage (with a different bank) and the net from the sale. I told him how much of our savings I was willing to contribute to the deal. And I asked that the bank finance the rest, that 40%. 

A lot of typing ensued. Understand, we were both wearing masks and Frederick was seated behind one of those clear plastic shields that they fit around office desks these days. (Future archeologists will struggle to determine the function of thousands of oddly shaped examples of wasted hydrocarbon.) I could see that Frederick was seriously crunching numbers to make things work. He finally looked up, said that he couldn't loan me the money, and scooted his chair around to my side of the desk to pinpoint on paper exactly why he could not. Long story short, basing our lending ceiling on our age and the income on our tax returns, primarily showing only Social Security income thanks to the surprisingly reasonable cost of living in France, I was asking to borrow too much.

He was a nice, earnest young man. I listened closely. I waited. Perhaps you can guess what I was waiting for. I waited for five minutes and I would have waited forever. So I asked the question.

"Suppose I put some more money into the deal. Could I borrow 30% instead of 40%?"

More typing. Smiles. Yes, that would do it.

I'm from the USofA. When two people want to do a deal and one can't quite get it done, negotiations begin. Avenues are explored. The French, not so much. They don't seem to want to make the first move. Anyway, that's done. Now I have to sell our house. I'll keep you apprised of the process. Meanwhile, here are some pics. If you know anyone looking for a lockup-and-leave in the rural south of France, send them my way. Have them bring about $150,000. I just might accept a bit less.

https://www.leboncoin.fr/ventes_immobilieres/2042201070.htm

BAR LE 40: RESTAURANT UPDATE

Quarante has a takeout pizza joint, an upscale-wannabe restaurant just outside of town, and the Bar Le 40.

Tito's Pizza is OK. It offers thin-crust French pizza, if you like that sort of thing - or can at least get used to it. Christophe, the owner, also runs the local wine co-op. (Why is Christophe's place called Tito's? I've never asked.) Because it's the grape harvest now, Christophe is busy day and night. Tito's is closed. Pizza will have to wait for a few weeks.

The Terminus, as you might surmise if you have a bit of French, is in the old train station just outside of town. The owners have spent the past few years 'upgrading' the menu to the point that they have priced themselves out of our rotation.

And then there's the Bar Le 40, which most of us just call Bar 40 because who needs the extra syllable?

The management of Bar 40 has changed hands several times since we moved here more than seven years ago. The latest owner, Alex, is the son of a previous owner who has opened a restaurant in a neighboring town. Alex is a young guy, a rugby player, hooked into the local scene and well-liked by all. More importantly, he has upgraded the menu while keeping the price low. Lunch is the only meal that he serves, although he does do bar-appropriate tapas in the evening and takeout burgers on weekends. (Really fine takeout burgers, by the way.) 

Given the uptick in quality, we have taken to checking out the week's menu that Alex posts on Facebook and on a slate in front of the door on Monday mornings. This week, we took special note of the slow-roasted leg of lamb for lunch on Thursday. If you have read my scribbles, you know that I am of the opinion that lamb in France tastes the way that lamb is supposed to taste. If you like lamb, and I like lamb, you will love the lamb in France. I love the lamb in France. We booked for lunch on Thursday.

We began with a choice of starters, fresh melon wrapped with serrano ham or a mixed salad topped with little balls of deep-fried bleu cheese. Both were full plates, well presented, with fresh ingredients and appropriate dressings. The lamb that followed was superb. The French use a word that was fully appropriate in this case - impeccable. The thick slice of meat was roasted to perfection, soft but still firm, smothered in its own reduced juices. Some of us chose the French beans for the side, some had frites - fries. For dessert, a little lemon tart, more like a cookie, with a bit of salty caramel sauce. (One of us chose two scoops of ice cream instead.) The five of us finished a liter of wine between us and three of us had coffee at the finish.

Here's the kicker. The tab came to just over 16€ apiece. About $19. How can you beat that?

RANDOM THOUGHTS NOT FRENCH: SGT PEPPER, TALIBAN, iPHONES, AND MORE #2

SGT. PEPPER

Music is essential. Spotily brings classical music to our house in the morning, jazz in the evening. When I need to, I put on my headphones and let Led Zeppelin get loud. Very essential. 

 But I need more room on the shelves in my office and my CD collection is so old school. So I'm verifying that all of the tunes on all of my CDs have been ripped to my portable hard drive. (I only ripped my favorites on some of them.) As a result, I've been listening to stuff that I have put aside for a while. In that vein, I listened to St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (SPLHCB), all the way through, from start to finish without stopping, for the first time in over 30 years. At least.

I'm going to pick nits. SPLHCB is not my favorite Beatles album. Revolver is. SPLHCB is basically a pop album, and their pop is my least favorite Beatles music. Fully half of the songs on SPLHCB fail to impress. On Revolver, only Yellow Submarine doesn't work for me. And that may be because I don't have kids. On SPLHCB, my favorite may well be Within You Without You. Yes, I'm one of those folks who enjoys Harrison's work at least as much as Lennon/McCartney's. Maybe more.

Oh, and Ringo is the best drummer ever. Only the fact that his drumming is so damn appropriate to the song draws your attention to it.

AFGHANISTAN 

Like a virus, unless they are totally flushed from the system, the Taliban were always going to recur. The question was never whether or not the Taliban would attempt to return to where they left off twenty years ago. The only question was whether or not they would succeed in doing so. And that turned out to be no question at all.

Get in. Punish the Taliban. Kill bin Laden. Get out. That was the mission.

Why have we waited twenty years to leave? Is there any chance that we have learned our lesson? Is there any chance that the USofA will turn itself into a modern, slightly decadent European-modeled social democracy any time soon? Hope springs eternal...

iPHONES

If I ever return to the USofA again, and if I happen to find myself near the cemetery where Steve Jobs is buried, I just may stop by to give the SOB a piece of my mind. 

I used to own a perfectly good tablet with WiFi that cost under $100 that connected me to the internet whenever I needed to. I used to own a flip phone that cost less than $50 that made and received telephone calls with ease. (You remember telephone calls, don't you? You called a friend and you talked to them. Actually talked.)

Noticing my ancient phones, friends made fun of me. It became a running joke. I didn't care. But then, suddenly, tragedy struck. I was gifted an iPhone 7 from a friend who had upgraded. Hearing that, another friend pulled an old 5 out of a desk drawer to give to Cathey. Both phones were kind of funky, chipped and cracked. But displays weren't effected and they worked just fine. And just like that, we became addicted. Like crack cocaine, all that it took was one hit. And now, Cathey and I each carry an iPhone Xr.

If I find Steve Jobs' grave...

STUPID

It's no longer funny. It's hard to remain polite. I don't care if Eric Clapton is tired of dealing with it.

COVID is real. It's killing people, possibly twice more than the official count. The hospitals are full of unvaccinated people dying of COVID. Hospitals are NOT full of people having bad reactions to the vaccine. Refusing to wear a mask in public spaces is not a choice. It's attempted manslaughter.

We got into this mess by abiding stupidity in too many aspects of our lives. The herd has not been sufficiently thinned. I don't know how we make up for this failure to adhere to the laws of natural selection.

LIVING IN FRANCE: THE SEASONS, EXERCISE, AND HANGING PICTURES #2

LANGUEDOC COUNTRYSIDE

I grew up on a dirt road surrounded by woods, cow pastures, and corn fields. I wasn't Opie. I could walk into town, we had access to both New York and Philadelphia network and local TV and radio programming, and both families of my parents had within memory lived for a time in New York City. We weren't hicks. But I could splash in a clean creek, pick gallons of blackberries without working very hard to find them, and drink milk that had very recently been inside of a cow that lived just down the road. Can you imagine going into a dairy barn, running the mixer to incorporate the cream, drawing off a gallon of fresh milk into the jug that you brought, and putting a dollar into the cigar box atop the mixer?

I feel at home in the Languedoc.The cow pastures and corn fields of my youth have been replaced by horse pastures and vineyards. Stone walls and tree lines separate the one from the other outside of Quarante as they used to do outside of Flemington before the housing developments ate up significant acreage. But French community planning is a topic for another day. My point is that I can walk out of my front door, turn right or left, it doesn't matter which, and within a few minutes be in the woods or on a hilltop with a beautiful view of fields and woods close by and mountains in the distance. I feel at home.

SEASONS

I think that there are more consequences of climate change than we realize because so many folks live urban or suburban lives these days and don't notice subtle changes. Seasons speak to the land, and folks in the south of France have long lived off the land in one way or another. For the vignerons, spring gets the vines up and running, summer sees them grow and mature, autumn brings harvest, and winter prepares you for the next cycle. The rest of us here sort of fall into that rhythm.

Its harvest now. While on our walk today, we saw tractors pulling trailers filled with freshly harvested merlot and sauvignon grapes. Older trailers aren't proof against liquid, so the roadways actually get sticky and smell of grape juice. I have a feeling that a more thorough discussion of the seasons and of the grape harvest are in order. Stay tuned!

WALKING FOR EXERCISE

A group of us walk three times a week for exercise, from two to eight people at a time, up to five miles at a clip. When we're done, we stop for a coffee together. Pictured are the markings that act as guides on walking trails. Blue lines and arrows would indicate local trails. There's a stylized symbol for all-terrain bikes. These red and white lines indicate that this trail is a part of the Camino de Santiago that marks St. James' wanderings through this part of Europe. Following these marks in the right direction will lead you right to the famous cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

HANGING PICTURES ON THE WALLS

In France, that activity is not as mundane as it might seem. To affix pictures on the walls of old French houses, like our old French house, can require serious plans of attack. Walls that are covered with plaster might hide the French equivalent of a cinder block, concrete, or a chunk of granite. Adhesive-backed hooks don’t stick well to rough plaster. And drilling into a rock that’s been a part of a wall for 1,000 years requires seriously manly tools. Picture hanging may sound like a simple task, but neither The Southern Woman That I Married nor I look forward to the endeavor.