Ragdoll

Hi Victoria   We have a house nr Montpon  you could try this web site some of whom do long term lets  we used them while looking for out house.  Most of the properties are in or near to St Meard De Gurcon which is about 10mins from the motorway link to Bordeaux.  Im not sure if im allowed to advertise it just in case if you PM me I will give you the details.

Thanks for that Dick.   Will they understand this? Qui est notre fournisseur de l'eau

Just to clarify my view   Before we bought we knew that to buy direct from a Notaire or Privately would save on fees  so of course that is what we would have prefered.  But being 1st TIME BUYERS in France we did not feel confident enough to only go down this avenue.  When first looking we did look at properties for sale with notaires but found the choice to be limited.  Once we found our house (private sale) we found the whole event easy and straightforward.  Like someone else said part of the process is the unknown factor and I quite enjoyed dealing with everything first hand as I knew exactly where we were.  However I think we were lucky in that the French seller has been very easy to deal with and has played no tricks and has not taken advantage of the fact that he speaks no English and my French is limited.  However there has been times when I had wished we did have the option of employing someone to ask questions to the seller.. Such as  "What are our neighbours names" Who owns the vinyard next door"  Who is your water supplier  When was your boiler last serviced  What is your landline phone no as FT need it to start up our new contract ect  sort of incidental things.  There are also rich UK's who are always willing to pay for things that save them time as they can probably earn more money concentrating on their job in UK.

Sorry to highjack onto your post but we might both get an answer. i need to know the water supplier for 24 nr Ste Foy la grande..one of the last pieces of our puzzle.

Just a second home im afraid unable to leave work or family at the moment.  Bought for holiday use for now with a view to a more permanent move a few years down the line. We bought now before it gets out of our reach.

What a great ending for Noonoo and your father in law. i hope all continues to go well for them both in 2006 and I HOPE the other dog finds just a good home as yours is.    

Reading through this thread i feel some of you may be being a little hard on Seanie.  We recently purchased in france for the first time most of our knowledge was gained through sites like this or books, however we did not feel confident enough to go it alone (or so we thought).  However we ended up purchesed a house privately just by driving around the areas we wanted to be and looking for houses with private for sale signs.  This was not intentional as we also visited lots of agents who showed us lots of places that were not suitable or were in the wrong places.  So we decided to narrow it down by choosing the area we knew we wanted and then looking for houses for sale privately or through agency signs, we then contacted the agent because we knew they had a property we wanted to see. (if you see what I mean) It was just luck that we found a private sale the man spoke no english (why should he) and I spoke only limited french but at the end of the day he wanted to sell so between us we made the effort and we negotiated after TOH and I had decided a ceiling price that we would go up to that we thought the property was worth to us.  Luckily we got it 5000 euros below our top price and made a saving of 22000 euros against the price with the agency ( of course that would have been lowered through negotiations). At that point we would of thought about using a private individual that was not an estate agent but could assist us with the following through of the transaction mainly because of language difficulties and because it would be diffiicult to do everything from the uk while we were working.  However we have managed the whole thing ourselves with the help of course of our Notaire (who has been great)  We have managed all the utilities ourselves and bank accounts ect .Ok we may have been lucky and weve had to bite the bullet and try things in our best French.  However my point is we may have considered using someone to assist just to give us peace of mind and to save the stress of trying sort everything out whilst holding down demanding jobs and families.   I dont think there would be enough call for it for anyone to make much of a living

Le Fleix 24 nr Ste Foy La Grande, not permanently but who knows perhaps when we can afford to retire.