Gold or a house in France?

During a search, it usually takes me around eight weeks to draw up a short-list of perfect properties for my clients. That usually means I will have visited around 80 to 100 properties, most of which I will have eliminated as not matching all the important criteria. The short-list builds up slowly until there are about eight to ten properties by the time my clients come out to view them with me.

Sometimes however, people are happy for me to take a bit longer with the search, particularly over the summer months when they don’t really want to come out to look at properties in the height of the holidays when accommodation is often booked up and the cafe and restaurant terraces are crowded. Plus many estate agents close down for two or three weeks in August anyway so as to avoid what they call ‘property tourism’ which involves bored tourists deciding to get a free tour of the area with the local estate agent even though they have absolutely no intention of buying anything.

Usually a longer search is no problem – houses don’t generally sell that quickly in France and many of the places I find are new to the market anyway or sometimes have yet to actually reach the open market. However there has been a bit of a shift lately and a slightly surprising one considering all the doom and gloom surrounding the property market in many parts of the world. Here there are certain price brackets where property seems to sell almost as soon as it reaches the market. Whether this is just here in the Midi-Pyrenees or all over France, I don’t know but here, the last few searches I have done between the 150-200,000 Euro price range and above 500,000 price range, I have seen houses new to the market, actually sell in the few weeks between making it to the short-list and my client’s viewing trip.

I am no economist and can only hazard a guess at why this is; so here is my theory. Within the 150-200,000 Euro price bracket, there is a great deal of buyer competition and not a huge number of properties available. This is the bracket in which many of the French find themselves as well as many foreigners looking for holiday properties so it is just simply a case of too many buyers after too few houses and hence, the minute a good one comes onto the market and it is priced correctly, it will sell. The second category; property above 500,000 Euros, is perhaps harder to explain in the current economic climate but my guess would be that there are people all over the world who do still have money and are looking for somewhere safe to invest it. Gold is now looking like a bubble, the dollar and the Euro are both basket cases, the Swiss Franc is on a run and many property markets have collapsed. French stone property however still looks like very good value – prices have stayed relatively steady, the government and the economy of France are also more stable than most – and, in the very worst case scenario, if everything else collapses around you, you still have a very nice, comfortable, well-built and usually rather lovely house to live in and escape the troubles of the world.

Certainly if I had money to spend, I know where I would be putting it and it wouldn’t be gold bars – nor would I hang around too long!

All quiet in the foothills

Scenes of sunflowers and mountains instead of rioting here in the Haute Garonne

My French friends and neighbours have been, if anything more shocked than us to see the images on the news of the English rioting, looting and setting cars and shops alight. This just does not fit the stereotype of the British that the French have in their heads in which we are still a quaint and proper, slightly uptight and certainly a non-demonstrative people. They expect such uncontrolled behaviour of the hot-headed Greeks, the fiery Spanish or even the Parisians (Paris is considered another country by people in this region) but they really never imagined seeing such images beamed out of Grande Bretagne.

We are lucky to be very distant from such troubles here; the nearest thing we get to a riot is when one of the old ladies queuing at the market gets served out of turn. Politeness is still king in this part of the world (drivers being the exception) and even chivalry still has its place, as I discovered yesterday.

I was viewing some properties and building plots with one of the best agents in this region. True that flip flops may not have been the best choice of footwear for plodding around the hills looking at terrain and luckily I was holding the camera when I spectacularly failed to make the jump over a ditch and up the hill with embarrassing results (what I do for my clients!) So when I did finally manage to clamber up the hillside to the relevant plot, it was with huge relief that my now favourite agent provided the solution to my dilemma of climbing back down again, below:

I think it is safe to say that here are certainly worse places to be right now than the sunny South West of France! 

Best of both worlds

The great thing about living right on the border of France and Spain is that, here in the Ariège and Haute Garonne, we get flavours of both cultures - with the emphasis on the best bits of each of course. Thus we have paella in the local markets and lots of Spanish themed festivals but these will generally be accompanied by French wine and croustade or tarte tatin.

Living so close to Spain also means that we are able to just pop over the border into Spain if we fancy the idea of tapas for lunch; which is exactly what we did yesterday, not so much for the food this time – although it was fantastic – as for the sunshine. Very unusually for this part of the world, we have just had a week of almost continuous rain (last seen in 1972, according to our local doctor) and, having lived here for a long time now, we seem to have rather lost that English tolerance to such weather.

Hence we decided that we would take a two hour drive (we are only 20 kilometres from Spain as the crow flies but the car journey is slightly more convoluted) over the mountains to see if we could find some sunshine. Sure enough, as we sat at the traffic lights on the French side of the tunnel leading into Spain, the temperature gauge in the car read 14 degrees; by the time we had travelled three kilometres through the tunnel and down the other side of the mountain, the temperature was already 27 degrees and by the time we were installed on the Spanish restaurant terrace 20 minutes later, it was 30 degrees.

What an amazing spot to live; where it is possible to travel a few kilometres through the mountainside not only from one country to another but from one completely different weather system to another, speak another language and eat completely different food. There can’t be too many places like this, where you really can enjoy the best of both worlds.