5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting the Home Buying Process in France

Whatever you do, don’t plan your home visits based solely off of the location listed in the ad. There were so many times when we were told to meet an agent in that town’s square or at their real estate office, only to be put into their car and driven a few towns over to view the home. This is something we didn’t realize happened, and it was incredibly disappointing.

Before leaving to travel abroad to view the homes, I had researched each town meticulously and took thorough notes on our access to necessary things. We wanted to be able to live in the town without a car, meaning we had access to at least one restaurant, one bakery, and one weekly market or store. Also, with Andy’s health conditions, we knew we wanted to be in a town that had its own pharmacy and a hospital within driving distance, which were two non-negotiables for us. Each time that this happened, we couldn’t help but feel a little duped, as the towns, more often than not, were tiny hamlets with no amenities from our checklist.

To buyers coming from the U.S. market, like ourselves, we found this aspect incredibly different. In the U.S., not only is the accurate town listed, but so is the actual home’s address. There had been many times while searching for our home in the U.S. when we had driven to the home listed for sale to see if we liked the location/neighborhood before even calling an agent to set up a viewing. To us, withholding the location seemed a bit counterproductive. One of the reasons this is done, however, is so that other agents can’t find the home, but more on that a little later.

The takeaway: if location is key, it’s important to confirm this with your agent before the viewing.

One thing that surprised us the most was that, in a lot of cases, the owners let us into the home and walked around with us during our house tour. While we found that, at times, this was helpful with some of the questions that came up about the property, a lot of times, it felt incredibly awkward.

In one instance, it was the home of the owners’ great-great-grandparents, who were winemakers in the region. The home was massive, with a whole wing of the upstairs shut off as the children moved out and the servant’s quarters were no longer needed. The completely encapsulated wing definitely piqued our interest, but it was in utter decay, being left to be taken over by nature. We, of course, saw all of the money we’d need to pour into this rotting space in order just to keep the rest of the house stable. The owner, however, saw precious childhood memories, looking past the mold and rotting wood, making sure to highlight the antique and original details. It left us feeling as though we had to keep our criticisms to ourselves and just smile and nod so as not to offend her or the agent.

In another instance, a retired couple from Paris was trying to sell their home as quickly as possible. It was explained to us that their daughter had just been told she had a terminal illness, and they had to move to be closer to her and help with her very young children. We loved the house, but it was in the middle of nowhere, leaving us unsure of the kind of life we’d have in such a limiting, secluded area.

During that particular visit, the owners followed us from room to room, eager to watch our reactions and gage our interest. This added an extra layer of stress that left our walk-through feeling somber and a bit anxious. The last thing we wanted to do was disappoint Madame and Monsieur. Ultimately, we decided against moving forward and opted for a town with more things on our “wants list,” but we felt terrible for leaving them in such a situation.

When it comes to disappointing, though, nothing was more disappointing than having the house viewing canceled for the home that made us cross the Atlantic to start our home-buying journey. Just mere hours before we were set to meet the agent, who we had been corresponding with for the past three months, we were told the family had something come up and, if we wanted to see the home, we could come back in a month when the owners could let us all in.

That wasn’t the first and only time that a showing was canceled on our trip due to owners having something come up and agents not having access to the property, which, as Americans, we found to be a bit odd. Every agent has keys or an access code to the home they’re selling here, so the fact that some agents just didn’t have access to their property was something we weren’t used to.

One thing that Andy and I couldn’t exactly wrap our heads around was the fact that sometimes we’d see the same home listed on multiple websites for sale. There was one home we wanted to tour that we actually had found on seven different agency sites. This, however, did end up working in our favor, as I had reached out via email, phone, and text to each listing office and, only after my third round of correspondence, finally got a response from one of the seven.

While we didn’t exactly know why this was at first, another agent let us in on this industry eccentricity. In France, a seller can have as many agents as they want, which goes hand-in-hand with our first point, the location not always being accurate. It was explained to us that if other agents know where homes for sale are located, they are able to visit the home and try to poach the listing.

Another quirk that we had heard about but only experienced once was when an agent had us meet them at the fountain in the middle of the town square. Before going further, she made us sign a contract stating that we would not approach the owner on our own after the visit. The idea of handling a real estate transaction without an agent isn’t a common practice in the U.S., so we had no problem signing the document. In our minds, we didn’t have enough knowledge of the home-buying process in our own native language to even begin navigating it sans a professional and completely in French!

She explained, however, that it isn’t uncommon for other agents to ask for this as well, so that after the viewing, potential home buyers don’t return to the home without the agent and cut them out of the whole process, just working directly with the owner themselves.

A little side note: There are houses that we very much wanted to see, and we reached out for months trying to connect with anyone to set something up. I still have not received a message or call back. In a desperate attempt, we even had the B&B owner where we stayed to leave a message at an agency, thinking that perhaps fluent French may be the ticket. It wasn’t. In the U.S. market, agents are cutthroat for a sale, whereas, in France, the agents seemed a bit more laissez-faire about selling. At one meeting we had, the agent remarked they weren’t in any hurry to sell the homes listed in the agency window. “If we sold them, there would be empty space in the window… empty space doesn’t look good,” she reasoned.

We were surprised to find that most ads for the homes had only a few, sometimes blurry, photos. Along with the limited number of photos provided, we were also confused as to why those photos usually didn’t include a photo of the exterior of the home. A different agent remarked that this was again due to the fact that the agent listing the home either didn’t want other agents to find the listing and poach it or have potential clients find the home themselves and make a deal with the owners without including them. Their logic was that it’s hard to find a home and poach it when you don’t know what it looks like from the outside!

The photos weren’t the only thing that surprised us when it came to the overall look of the homes. On two different occasions, the homes were left in absolute chaos. In one home, it looked as if the owner had hosted a massive dinner party and then left. Dishes were piled up in the sink, food was left out rotting on the counter, crumbs were everywhere, and that messy esthetic carried on throughout each floor of the home. Shoes spilled out of the closet into a big heap on the bedroom floor; fruit was left to rot on a table in the living room. When I casually mentioned the mess during the walk-through, the agent seemed utterly offended, leaving me unsure if I had just accidentally made a faux pas. But what Andy and I had to remember was that these agents weren’t OUR agents and had their client’s best interest in mind, not ours, but more on that coming up.

The U.S. housing market is all about having the future owners be able to envision themselves living in the space. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on staging homes and making sure potential buyers are seeing the home in the best light. While we knew that things were going to be radically different and are both very good at being able to embrace other cultures’ habits and normalities, lack of cleanliness, no matter which country, is a total no-go for us. It was hard to see past it, leaving the house off of our second visit list.

When we planned out our home-buying trip abroad, we decided to rent a car in Perpignan and weave our way across the South, visiting a few homes with each stop. Because some of the homes were in vastly different locations across the country, we didn’t expect to have the same agent for each. What we were surprised to find out, though, was that only the sellers themselves have an agent, and if you want to see five different homes in a certain area, chances are you will have five different agents. This made things a bit confusing at times, trying to keep each person/agency straight with what house they were showing and at what day and time. Spreadsheets were my friend on this trip, and I kept detailed records of agents, their agencies, phone numbers, times of our meetings, and where exactly we were instructed to meet up.

This doesn’t exactly mean that the agents wouldn’t try to show you other properties. On more than one occasion, an agent had carved out a whole afternoon for us without letting us know beforehand and wanted to take us to lunch and discuss other properties they had that may pique our interest. Unfortunately, we had planned our limited time in each region very carefully, leaving very little time to stray from our schedule of events. On two occasions, the agents gave off the air of being very offended that we weren’t taking the extra time.

Time, you will see, is a common thread in a lot of French idiosyncrasies. In a lot of cases, the agents wanted to take time with us in order to build a relationship. This is a concept new to us here in the U.S. A lot of common daily activities in France revolve around spending time and building relationships with people. It’s important to build a rapport with your town’s butcher, cheesemonger, and other people you may see weekly. Sitting for hours over a bottle of wine and a few nibbles at an apèro, just passing time chatting with new and old friends, is the ultimate homage to time well spent in France.

In the U.S., time is money, as the old saying goes. Your agent will spend the time emailing you some listings and showing up to unlock the doors and take you on a tour, but anything past that would be considered a waste of their precious time, and any wasted time equals wasted money. They are there to sell a home, not make a friend, so the idea of sitting down to show you listings they could just email would be absolutely absurd to them. We did, however, have a few agents who were not French and who embodied more of the American style of real estate, though it was a total mixed bag.

If you are interested in beginning your house-hunting journey in France, especially if you are American, the best advice I can give you based off of my own two-month journey through the South would be to slow down, especially if you are looking to buy in the South where everything is a little slower paced. The circumstances that brought you to this life-changing decision probably revolve around wanting what most foreigners come to France for: a better quality of life. So, embrace the waiting and allow yourself to slow down and enjoy the process. Depending on the circumstances, it will not be quick. We bought our home in June and finally signed the paperwork at the notaire in December. Just remember, this process is totally worth the thirty emails/phone calls to an agent before you receive one response. As Americans, we are used to things happening quickly and a fast-paced process. You could see a home, buy it, and move in within weeks. The process of home buying abroad may, at times, feel tedious and unnecessarily drawn out, but just remind yourself that when you’re sitting with your new neighbors one warm summer evening over a bottle of rosé, the last thing you’ll be dwelling on is all of the hoops jumped through or length of time it took to finally get there!