Jupiter

I urge sellers to think about using the internet to sell their properties privately. If you feel you must use an agent then do so without giving sole selling rights so that you can still  do some advertising and promotion of your own. There are sites such as http://www.french-property.com & http://www.1st-for-french-property.co.uk and newpapers such as French News (http://www.french-news.com) where anyone can inexpensively advertise  property details with photos. Both buyer and seller profit if there isn't an agent in the middle trying to milk off  ridiculous agency commissions of up to 10% . Not only this but  a buyer  can gain a much clearer and quicker impression of a property  without an agent who will try to obscure the property address until the buyer has visited the agency office and signed up. What a waste of time this can be. Most houses advertised by agents  are described in terms  that  enable you to pinpoint their locations only to within about 10 or 20 kms! It's a myth that you need an agent as a go-between with the notaire. What you might need is a translator. If agents feel the wind of competition from private sales there is the possibility that competition will drive down fees and improve service.

Pancake I guess  you've already looked at French News small ads (online http://french-news.com) but you might try posting a wanted ad with them. Are you looking for long or short term let? A winter let  in the rural Midi-Pyrennees region of SW France might be about 500 or 600 euros per month but that would likely exclude any heating gas, fuel oil or firewood.

AntonRedman Solid good sense, thank you. We don't have to take this sort of thing from the tunnel operators as long as there are good ferry services at competitive prices. Let's support them instead.

Mickcooke I regret I cannot offer any new information about market trends. All I am really doing right now is casually browsing the market for another house, having just sold one. We don't live in France for more than 4 months each summer so we can go slow on this. For the  purpose of our current search for a house my approach to property prices is very low tech (probably like everybody else's). At base I know recent actual selling prices of 5 houses in our vicinity, these provide solid benchmarks. I'm also aware of another 5 or 6 houses that have been sitting around unsold for over a year - these show me specific prices higher than the market will bear. Against this simple sort of matrix I am trying to compare new offers. Of course I would like to factor in market trends but I am merly guessing that the market is flat or very slightly into negative territory.

St Amour ...your UK agent was wanting approx 2.25% - as they say, you pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Come to France, pay four times as much, get even more monkeys. Conclusion is that in the internet age you don't need an agent to sell your house.

We spent the 2005/6 winter in the Quercy region about 150 kms north of Toulouse and 100 kms south of the Dordogne. In Jan & Feb we had sub-zero temperatures nearly every morning. On 18 Jan there fell 9 inches of snow and people in the village told us that it was without precedent. They did say, however, that the previous winter they had had a frost of minus 25 C. On the cold days I would sometimes look at the weather reports for the Mediterranean coast 300kms to the south and I noticed that usually the temperatures were much the same as we were experiencing. I guess that local weather is much more a function of local topography than latitude. So perhaps a relief map of France would be one good guide.

Sweet 17 thank you, brilliant message and I admire your sheer hard work. What a monumental undertaking! When I stopped chuckling I realised of course that you're confirming my worst fears. We're all buying in the dark. Information is hard to get. Information of actual  prices paid is probably impossible to get. You put your finger on it when you mentioned  the need  to develop a sixth sense.

I've just now joined this Forum and read most of the thread "French house prices fall." My first question is how can one judge? I see advertised asking prices all over the place but is there any sort of  central registry where actual paid prices are recorded and published? I'm a Brit living in the US and here there are any number of websites where I can look up the sale price of every house in my street going back five years or more. In France it seems I can look only at asking prices and while many appear plausible there are a large minority which seem way out of line. How do people reach an opinion on the market, is it anecdotal evidence, gut feeling, newpaper reports, agency press releases? About agents' commissions. Three months ago we sold our vacation house near Cahors (Dept46) privately but three agents we approached wanted commissions ranging from 6.5% to 10%. Their attitude was don't worry, the buyer pays. Now that we want to buy another house the agents say don't woory about our fees they're all included! Do people really fall for this?