Selling French houses

[Jo53]

Is anyone else out there trying to sell their French house at the moment? How is it going? Or has anyone sold recently? Our house has been on the market for 3 months, with a large local agent and also an agent who markets houses in the UK. We've had only 3 viewings so far, one lot of which were obviously just being nosy and weren't the least bit interested in buying. I'm beginning to worry that it will take forever to sell. The house is lovely and in excellent order. But I get the feeling that the English are not buying in any numbers and that few French in rural areas have the money to buy a nice house.

Jo

[Minouette]

I 'thought' I had sold without my house going onto the market at all!

But see my post titled Two Days, Two Shocks a bit further down........ [:(]

I live next door to a lady who works for an agence d'immobilier though.... and she seems to have quite a few sales going through, with both English buyers and French.

I remember when I was looking for a house to buyI used to look firstly in the local freesheet, and on all the noticeboards (supermarkets, tabacs, epicerie etc) that I could find.  Maybe you could extend your reach into the market in that way?

And good luck!

[Anton Redman]

For the last 18 months I have thought the market for sales to the UK market for anything over Euros 120000 was pretty thin. When we were loking to upgrade from a holiday home 15 months ago the mantra from French agents was it is very good that you are looking now we could not spend this amount of time with you in the summer. Many houses which we looked at are still on the market. UK view was that on average people looked at 15 houses before they bought which means on average 15 viewings to sell. Both times we purchased in France we looked at at least 20 properties.

I would add information on where you are trying to sell in France to the question

I would search the Internet and see how easy it is to find your house and how many similar homes come up. If you cannot find your house add extra agents. Get some UK based friends to search then ask for more details of your house and see how long they take to come through

I would also select say a dozen houses on the internet which were similar and see if they were sold in the period you were trying to sell. When we were selling up in the UK three years ago we watched 20 properties which were on the market  when we started on sell only two of which had sold 12 months latter .

[Jo53]

Thanks Anton. Your point about 15 viewings is worth remembering. It's just that 15 viewings are looking pretty unlikely this side of 2009 at this rate. We're going to have to do more on the marketing side, although there is a fine line between good marketing and over-marketing, which makes people look desperate and makes buyers suspicious.

[P]

Jo wrote

‘Potential viewers not seeming interested:’

 We have recently spent two weeks viewing 60 properties. Some of these were ones that we requested, having seen them on the Internet. Others were ones that agents ‘thought we would be interested in’.

 

The viewing process is different to the UK. In the UK we would have driven by the property, decided if it was in the correct location, how did it look condition wise etc and only if we wished to proceed further then make a visit.

 

The French system is different and the first time that you will see the property is when you actually view. We then found that some of our choices were not what we wanted. Some of the properties that the agents thought we would like to see in no way met with what we were looking for – it seemed they thought they would show us some properties, probably because they could not meet what we wanted, in case we changed our mind – we did not.

 

If properties were occupied we tried to show some interest for the sake of the occupiers, aware also that we did not want to raise peoples hopes too much as it seemed that there were a number of desperate soles keen to sell.

 

Towards the end of the two weeks we made an offer on a property that we had seen on the Internet. It was one of the last viewed and until then we thought that we would be returning later in the year to carry on the search. The offer was accepted and we travelled over last week so that we could sign the Compris at the Notaires office at the time and date that the vendor said that they would be available. We turned up but sadly the vendor did not and could not be reached by phone but that is another story.

 

It seemed to us that there was a lot of property on the market with some seeming very overpriced. Also, having monitored the Internet for the last year it would seem that selling in 3 months would be an extremely fast sale. Whilst Jo says that the house is in good condition etc, unless it is what someone is looking for it will not sell.

 

Paul