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~ A fairy-tale cottage by the Seine in Normandy

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Tag Archives: Buying a house in France

Cider Days

14 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by chaumierelesiris in Food, France, Les Iris, Normandy, Property in France

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

apple trees, apples, autumn, Buying a house in France, calvados, cider, Food, France, Normandy

Autumn is all about apples in Normandy and, by association, cider. Normandy is the only region in France that doesn’t produce wine, but it makes up for it with an amazing array of cider and its more potent cousin, calvados.

We’ve tried much cider and calvados in Normandy. Everyone with a couple of apple trees seems to have a go at brewing. When we were house hunting in the region, no visit was complete without the owner offering a sample of their very own tipple, and we’ve seen more than a few dinner parties off with a bang by introducing their DIY calvados.

Orchard with sheep, Normandy

The nearest cider maker to Les Iris, signposted on the main road to Sainte-Opportune-La-Mare, is excellent. Like champagne, his cider comes in doux, brut and semi-brut.

Cider, Normandy

He also maintains a vigorous vegetable garden, and sometimes sells extra produce alongside the cider. He takes the children into the garden, lets them choose their vegetables, and pulls the selected plants out of the ground, shaking off the rich dark earth. It’s the freshest lettuce and rhubarb in the world.

Vegetable garden, Normandy

In our garden there’s only one very old and gnarled apple tree standing guard by the gate. One of these days it will go: until then, it insists on producing an abundance of large green-red apples that turn brown within seconds of being cut open. Still, we’re delighted to have a token apple tree, and one of these days we might plant another, of the cooking apple variety.

Apple tree, Normandy

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Five reasons to buy in France

29 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by chaumierelesiris in France, Property in France

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Buying a house in France, Notaire, Property

Everyone gave us reasons not to buy a house in France. The impenetrable legal system. Totalitarian mayors. Unthinkable plumbing and sewage systems. The Euro! (This last, in retrospect, was probably the best reason). Everyone we knew seemed to have a friend who had had terrible trouble with a property transaction in France. Practical strangers volunteered their (mostly negative) opinions. We had bought and sold homes in London, never in France. London had not been easy. We expected the worst.

In the event, the transaction couldn’t have gone more smoothly. (I have written elsewhere about the bits that were difficult – finding the right house in the first place, and dealing with the French bank.) There are many places where you can read about the legal process of buying a house in France, including FrenchEntrée, Angloinfo and French Connections. Here are some of the books we found helpful:

These are the five top things we most enjoyed about the transaction.

  1. No gazumping! Rather wonderfully, the written purchase offer, the offre d’achat, prevents the seller from showing the house or considering any other offers after yours has been accepted. Having been gazumped (outbid after our offer was accepted) a few times in London, this started things out on a positive footing, for once.
  2. No surveyor! Surveyors feature prominently in London property exchanges, though it remains unclear to me what value they add. The sale price never seems to change, no matter what horrors the surveyor finds in the house you are buying. And there is always something that is not discovered by the surveyor – the boiler, inevitably, breaks down beyond repair the week after you move in. In France, our seller had kept excellent records of all works done on the cottage. He was a retired builder from Paris’s 16th arrondissement, and he had looked after the cottage carefully. Moreover, the French legal system requires the seller to secure independent reports on heating, electrics, asbestos and much more. Those reports were more thorough than anything we had paid a surveyor for in London.
  3. No lawyers! In UK property transactions, every step you take, every move you make is a legal one. The lawyers wrangle over which surveys can be done and which appliances are included in the sale and what will be done on which date. In France, property exchanges are overseen by the notaire, a public official who conducts searches, prepares documents, and collects the taxes. The same notaire acts for both parties. The process is heavily regulated and requires extensive disclosures from the seller, meaning we didn’t need a lawyer to secure the right documentation or set an appropriate timeline.
  4. Meet the notaire! In the UK, completion is purely a legal act, done by fax and email. It is quite possible that you might never meet the seller in the flesh. (They are running away before you discover all those faults the surveyor didn’t spot). In France, the Acte de Vente is an event. The buyer and the seller meet at the notaire’s office. Our notaire was based in a low-slung, modern building near the centre of a market town. The entrance had the feel of a GP’s office, but inside the corridors and offices were lined with traditional glass-fronted mahogany book cases that were stuffed from floor to ceiling with fat, ancient legal texts. The notaire was youngish, very tall, and utterly professional. During the previous weeks he had proven particularly effective at convincing French bank clerks to do their jobs in a timely manner. Intriguingly, there was no sign of a computer in his office. The huge desk which stretched diagonally across the room, leaving the rest of us an odd triangular space in which to arrange ourselves, was entirely covered with untidy stacks of case files. The meeting lasted about an hour. The notaire went through the paperwork section by section, checking that all was in order. Finally we all signed each page of the contract, and by the end my hand ached. And then we all shook hands with each other several times, and the notaire hurried us out and went off to greet his next appointment.
  5. Welcome home! Like sellers in London, estate agents tend to disappear from the scene once the exchange is done. In France, our estate agent – mid fifties, easy-going and athletic, always up for a drink and chat and never even a bit pushy – had made other arrangements. We would all, he announced, go back to the cottage after the completion. And so we did – the estate agent, the seller, as well as the seller’s daughter and granddaughter, a couple from down the street, and the children from next door. We drank champagne which the estate agent had arranged with the seller to chill at the cottage in advance. Boat on Seine, NormandyThere were candies and cakes for our children. Our seller, glass in hand, took us around the house again – showing us every light fixture, where the pipes were situated, how the electrics worked, hidden cupboards he had designed, and we could see how much he loved the cottage and how sad he was to leave. We knew he would be returning to the area for medical check-ups, and we invited him to visit when he did, and knew that he would. And then everyone left, and we walked down to the end of our garden and finished the champagne, watching the boats go past on the Seine.

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How to Buy a House in Normandy, Online

19 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by chaumierelesiris in Les Iris, Property in France

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Buying a house in France, House in France, House in Normandy, Property, real estate

It took us six years to find a house in Normandy. We started visiting the region when our older daughter was almost one. She was learning to speak, and we wanted French to feel as close to native as it could to a child living in London. When we bought Les Iris she was seven, and her sister three.

Why did it take us so long?

There are several reasons. The one I want to dwell on today is the technology of buying a house in France. If you don’t live in France, it’s hard to get excellent information about French property. Even if you speak French fluently as we do (full disclosure: by we, I mean my husband).

I do everything online. And have been, for the last 10 years. I buy food online. I buy clothes online. I buy Christmas online.  I bought my kitchen sink online.

Really. When you have young children and a full-time job, shopping is one of the things that disappears. Fast. Walton Street, Marylebone High Street, Westfield: who has the time? Five minutes in the pharmacy at lunchtime is as close as I get to physical shopping these days. So I went online.

When you shop for a property in London there are wonderful websites like Zoopla and Globrix. You can look at property for sale on a specific street. You can see what properties have been bought recently nearby, and for how much. You can find out the crime rate, and which schools are best. For France it was even more important to have this information before driving up to five hours to see each property.

The information just wasn’t there, or I couldn’t find it. There is detailed historical population and employment data available from INSEE. But I wasn’t able to find information about crime rates, school rankings or property sales. Is this stuff really not out there? Does anyone know? If you do, please let me know.

More than anything, I wanted a website that would let me search by location. I wanted to look at the satellite imagery of the area around a house even before I talked to an agent let alone made the trip to France. I never found a site that did this, exactly. Often agents wouldn’t even share the coordinates of a property so that we could plug them into our satnav.  Many rendevous were arranged in parking lots outside churches and town halls. Perhaps the agents were afraid we would try to cut a direct deal with the owner.

Floor plans were extremely hard to come by. At best, there was a hand-drawn approximation. Pictures on property websites were often partial, hiding the major road behind the hedge, or the electric pylon at the end of the garden, or the old mines under the property that were in danger of caving in at any moment.

Many homes we saw were listed as ‘habitable’. Some of these were in excellent condition. Others had holes in the roof, asbestos in the walls, no heating or no discoverable sewage system.

Things have improved recently. The site where we found our cottage, Green-Acre (formerly ImmoFrance), has gathered traction with estate agents, and today the site lists over 70,000 French properties in all of the major European languages. You can search for property by town or area and sign up for email updates about new properties. CapiFrance.co.uk, which has a network of estate agents working under its brand name, has a portal in both French and English, and has listings from over 300 estate agents.

British-run sites have also worked to fill the gap. Somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 British live in France, depending on whose estimates you believe. Many more are looking for homes in France, and agencies catering to English-speaking buyers abound. We found Domus Abroad and A House in Normandy to be particularly helpful, offering high levels of personal service. Other useful sites were the Sextant French Property Network, Rightmove France, Leggett and La Résidence.

We also did a lot of offline research. We bought property magazines. The French like to own country homes, and Normandy is near enough to Paris that it attracts editorial attention. The magazines Maisons Normandes and Belles Demeures can be picked up in newsagents. There are also property specials in weekly news magazines like Le Point.

Late in the day, we discovered that notaires, as well as estate agents, can hold property listings. Often these will be advertised on a board outside of the notaire’s office, or in the regional trade publications available in the reception of the local notaire’s office.

We got to know local estate agents. We walked around the towns we liked and noted down the names of estate agents, then built up a relationship. In person they were friendly, full of local information, and professional. They’re also a pleasure to work with once you find a house and I’ll write more about that later.

Agents we spoke to included Patrice Besse, a Paris-based agency specialising in castles and manor houses with a significant portfolio in Normandy. This is property porn at its best: very little you can afford, and looking at it will suck hours from your life. There’s even an iphone app. More realistic in our bit of Normandy were Cany immobilier and Le Forestier.

In the end, we did find our property online. Technology caught up with us and one morning there it was, in my inbox. Les Iris.

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