Area of limoges

[Petrified]

Hello,

my family and i are thinking of moving to france to set up a B & B.  We are thinking of the limoge's and surrounding area..would any of you kind people now anything about this area and would it be suitable for a small B & B. I know this is a frequent asked question but any information will be gratefully recieved, i'm so confused to know which area to look at.  We have looked at serveral properties on the net (its over a hundred actually) and plan to go out in the summer or if not sooner

[Cerise]

Hi Petrified

Wouldn't recommend anyone to set up a B & B in an area they did not know.  The Limousin is beautifully green because it rains a lot!!  Therefore, perhaps not the area for out of season tourists.  I'm sure I'll be immediately contradicted by everyone who lives there

Suggest the only real way is to go and look.  Speak to the local tourist office to see what kind of accommodation is being sought.  Round here, for example, there are too many large gites and not enough for 2 or 4 people.  It may be that they can recommend an area where there is insufficient accommodation.  Don't forget that very few properties are immediately occupiable as B & B - and bathrooms etc take time to come by.  You need to make sure you have sufficient income to see you through until you start earning, possibly several years.

I am not being pessimistic, just realistic.  Does someone in the family (you don't say how many people) speak good enough French to deal with all the formalities - if not, do you know a good local translator who you are prepared to pay.

B & B is hard work, if you really want to do it - and who am I to talk, we gave up good jobs, security etc to do just that - book yourself a working holiday and go and do the research.  Stay in Formule 1 or similar so you are not tempted to lounge around enjoying yourself and go and ask lots and lots of questions.  The tourist office, chambre de commerce, other local traders and the mairie are people to ask whether such a business is viable in their area.

Good luck

Maggi

www.les-cerisiers.net

 

[Petrified]

Thank you maggi,

I know we have to get over to france and look its just knowing which area to look in, we have a budget of around £90,000 thats everything included from renovations to 2 yrs "living" money until we get up and running. We are not doing it to become the Bill Gates of the BB world, its the way of life that attracts us.

Just 1 more question, would if be worth having a B&B with just 2 spare rooms?

many thanks....Martin

[Blackadder<IMG src="http:forums.livingfrance.comimagesline.gif"><BR>Blackadder<BR>Keighley and Creuse]

Without putting too much of a dampener on it i'd say you are pushing it somewhat with that money.

Do you mean that the £90k also has to buy the property?

If so, I'd think long and hard because i cannot see it being achievable, if you have the money set aside for the property, maybe.

We have a barn 40k East of Limoges, lovely countryside, like the Yorkshire Dales but with trees. Not too many tourists tho' Lots of English around, looking for places.

I'd look for a 'niche' if i were setting up any sort of accom. I.E Bunkhouse type place for bikers with map guided routes of the ace roads and advertise in the British Motorcycle press, or cycling breaks where you pick up clients at the Airport and provide decent bikes for day routes around the countryside??

Re 2 bedrooms....we pay about £25 to £30 for 2 for b and b, so if you were full 3 days a week through the year, you'd make £150 a week. You will only possible achieve 2 days max so perhaps £100 per week, not enough to live on.

My experience of this area is that the visitors, certainly from England, sort everything out themselves, are not bothered about beach/clubs etc and with loads of Gites available, invariably book a Gite for their group of 4/5/6 etc.

I still believe there is a market for the right gite at the right price in the right area, but advertised correctly. You greet them on the first day and barring incident, say goodbye on the last. It'd be my way forward as opposed to the hard work of a B and B.

All the above are just observations and opinion after much travelling to France, particularly over the past 4 years

[Petrified]

Yes blackadder 90K is the budget, i can do most of the work myself being in the builder trade..a jack of all..etc etc...

Do you think i'm being unrealistic with this budget am i dreaming or could i make this a reality..

petrified

[Anton Redman]

Some thoughts - Sorry to sound like the prick in the balloon factory of life but :

 

Based on our experiences of house hunting in and around the Haute Vienne and Northern Dordogne over the last six months you are unlikely to find a building with potential for letting out two bedrooms to the UK market for your budget.  The area has been picked over pretty heavily over the last three years and property prices have risen steeply as a result.  Some of the Estate Agents we have spoken to have had grave doubts about both the prices being paid and the viability of the businesses people are planning to set up.

 

The Haute Vienne remains a very poor part of France. One of the two bars in Vayres went broke last year, the local countryside is full of Hamlets and Towns in which Bars, Restaurants and Hotels have closed. The autoroutes mean that you can finish a business meeting at say  5pm and be in Paris or Marseilles than evening. Check out the Green Michelin guide to France on how few local places are ‘interesting’ let alone ‘Worth a Detour or Journey’

 

We know of three local businesses B & B businesses that have closed in last two years. Mainly because income was not covering basic costs like advertising and cotisation let alone providing a living income.  I have lost count of the number of newly opened or to be opened B & B’s we have heard off. What I have not found is an unfulfilled demand. If I wanted to make a go of this as a business I would save more and find an area where there was under capacity.  Also remember it costs just a much to advertise two rooms as it does half a dozen.

 

One  way I know of checking capacity is checking by telephone in the high season and seeing how easy or otherwise it is to get a reservation. Apart from the two months of the summer holidays there seems to be more than enough capacity here and not enough demand. Alternatively come down in May and talk to a few local owners.

 

 

[Miki]

I agree with Anton.

Without wishing to harp on about about where a B&B should be, to enable a "family" to be able to live off the income, I repeat, basically it has to be where tourists flock to and with a long (very) season.

Of course one will have to pay something which reflects that criteria, around here anything less than K300€ "minimum" simply will not give you a place with sufficient rooms, 5 minimum, or 4 as long as they are close to family room size plus of course , rooms for you and the family.

The B&B should be of the right quality, be in the right position, very close or bang in the area that tourists want to be and definitely close to a main or mainish road and not so far out in the country that people will simply not continue to follow your signs.

You can buy B&B's cheaply, why is question one and that should be obvious. If you want to make a living solely from a B&B, I am sorry but as in life, you really do only get what you pay for. Many, many sell up every year thinking that the perfect place to live, is the perfect place for a B&B, that is unfortunately not the case, living in the wilds on top of a lonely hill with nothing but the birds and animals for company will unfortunately not be the ideal place for a B&B business, worse luck perhaps?

[Ian Hoare<br>All the best<br>Ian<br>La Souvigne Corrèze<br>http:www.souvigne.com]

Hi Petrified

We live in the Limousin, in the Correze, just north of Argentat, which is becoming a fairly major tourist area for those looking for "tourisme vert". We've been running a B&B with 3 rooms for 10 years with a very successful website. We're also in Gites de France, Guide Routard and Alastair Sawday - none of this to brag, but to say that we can hardly imagine being able to do MUCH more to fill ourselves. We keep our prices down (around E37 per room) to keep our turnover up, and it works pretty well as annually, we're about 45% to 50% full, giving us an income of around £10k.

Most of this is profit as we do everything in the house ourselves. We know of very few people in our area who manage _both_ to be full AND to have high prices. Only one couple in fact, but they have a 4 épi 16th century manor in Collonges la Rouge, which is about the most touristed village and has no hotels.

It took us about 6 years to get to that figure of income, and I have difficulty in seeing how in a less touristed area, (the Haute Vienne is gorgeous, but apart from Oradour sur Glanes doesn't have too many visitors) you'd get a better figure more quickly.

My advice to anyone seeking to run a B&B here, is that it's great way of complementing your income - retirement or the proceeds of a house sale in the UK - but you won't be able to live on it. House prices (largely thanks to British people flooding out here in the last 5 years) have gone through the roof, and there isn't the equity difference between here and the UK that there was 15 years ago, when we bought our own house sufficiently cheaply to be able to invest the difference and live on it.

By all means come over, and perhaps stay with one or other of the people running B&Bs in this area, and tak to them. I've no fear of sharing real figures, and I would hope others here wouldn't either. But although £90k might just about buy you a nice place, capable of being converted for 4-5 top class Chambres d'Hôte and pay for the materials to allow you to do it up to a proper standard, it wouldn't leave you ANY income while building up the Biz. Nor would it be in a touristy area. Also .. Are you prepared to work 80 hour plus weeks during the season for your £10k?

Sorry to be negative, but it breaks my heart when friends have to pack up and leave because - as I warned them would happen - they haven't been able to live on Chambres d'Hôte.

[ChezShells]

Cant see you doing it with 90k, being a builder is a big plus though.

[benson]

I would recommend researching areas around Aubusson there still seems to be a shortage of holiday accomodation in the small towns around here.  It is possible to get a good bargain here but they are mainly small properties or complete restoration/renovation properties.

We bought a large barn to convert into 2, 3 bedroom gites and also our main home.  In this area it is  possible to get year round or long rents as it is becoming increasingly popular with british looking for property in out of season times although it it still not realistic for us to rely on this income alone.

Luckily my OH is a builder and is doing all the work apart from the electrics and plumbing himself.  This has saved us money but has drasticly increased the time it will take for us to finish the project.

My husband registered at the CdM as an artisan and is now to busy most of the time working on other peoples renovations to do much at home but this is necessary otherwise how would we afford to renovate!! a catch 22 situation!

Don't be fooled into thinking your money will last for long it wont.

Good luck

[mascamps.com]

I'll second the others in saying that £90k is a very low budget it it's the entire budget to cover everything from buying the place to paying for your daily living expenses for a year or two. That's even before the unexpected bills turn up like 3.000€ for your social security contributions or the new cooker etc.

We are right on a main road in a relatively touristy area but even so getting people in the door is far from easy. For the first year you are basically talking internet marketing and brochures in the tourist office and local attractions which can get you a reasonable number of people in from a standing start. It's best to be promoting your place a couple of months before the tourist season. As we found out, there's really no point in racing to get in at Easter because all we got were a couple of driveby clients yet this year we were completely full for the same period (all internet bookings) and had to turn away the drivebys.

As far as inprint advertising goes, the lead time is such that it will likely be 18 months or more from when you get your place 'til you start to appear in print for the first time. It's also expensive too: Chez Nous runs to about £500 and others like Petit Futé are 150€ or so a year. The problem is also that you don't know if a given outlet will work for you 'til you try it.

Don't forget that you can also get a bad year. Last year was dreadful down here (near Perpignan) and one local hotel ran for two weeks solid in August with no customers at all! It can be that bad if you get a combination of "bad things" happening at once: in our own case we had, in addition to the duff German economy and Americans not travelling, the excessive heat from the previous year all combining to really drop the numbers.

You will get a lot of help from the other owners. We've found this site very useful: not only do you get the answers in the forum but you will get people e-mailing you privately and we've found that to be very, very useful. It's also useful to establish contacts with a similar place that's not right beside you: basically one that's far enough away that you're not competing directly with them.

I'll stick my neck out and contradict some more senior members in saying that I think you can live on a B&B income. However, to do that you need a large place (5 or 6 rooms) that is both in a good (ie touristy) area and is in a good location in that area. You also need to do more than just run a B&B. Meals are essential: in our own case, when people take an evening meal it pretty much doubles our income from their room. Snag is, that not everyone will take their meals with you (I originally estimated 50% of people and have found that's not far off the mark for us). You need to lengthen the season by doing things to attract people outside the summer eg in our own case we are starting to run walking tours. Marketing is absolutely essential: I have been spending almost every Sunday afternoon for the last year looking for additional places to list ourselves and keeping an eye out for ways to extend the season (hence the walking tours). Surprisingly even after a year of my "Sunday Searches" I still regularly come across additional places to list (even with me being too stingy to pay more than 50€ or so at most). If a site is free, you should be on it as you never know when someone will use that site to find you. If it costs money, it needs to offer something special or unique for me to pay even the 50€. Sites move up and down in their effectiveness as you'll see from the slagging that both visitfrance and frenchconnections have been getting here: they were great sites a while ago but apparently have gone to seed recently.

 

Arnold

 

[Miki]

Arnold said "....I'll stick my neck out and contradict some more senior members in saying that I think you can live on a B&B income. However, to do that you need a large place (5 or 6 rooms) that is both in a good (ie touristy) area and is in a good location in that area. You also need to do more than just run a B&B. Meals are essential.."

Tis not I that would contradict Arnold !

To live comfortably on the money taken solely by a B&B with a family and signed on at the C de Com, be paying all the cotisations and have school & dinner fees, all the house bills, car bills and just about every bill a family in France can think of, means you simply must have a B&B in the best position a B&B could be in.

No mortgage, no credit, yes you must do food but Arnold you have to remember, a B&B will not get high profits from meals, the numbers simply do not addup with the few people that are legally allowed to eat, as all of us that do meals have said, it is the "come on" that brings more people in, as far as profit, yes of course there is a little but not enough to shout home about.

We shut for 3-4 months every year, at the pace we find ourselves going, especially from May to end of September, we have to close, to continue without a break for us would be suicidal. I say this bit because we are OK, we are getting by as they say.

So anyone with the strength of mind (and fitness)who took over and opened all year would do very well, perhaps quite a lot better, so in this case I would definitely say, an energetic vibrant couple with kids could survive quite well but the criteria for all this, will not come cheaply !

[Ian Hoare<br>All the best<br>Ian<br>La Souvigne Corrèze<br>http:www.souvigne.com]

Hi,

My last word (probably )

I agree that in a very good area, with a very long season, it may be possible to live on CdH.

I know nowhere in the Limoges area that is that good a location, nor one with a long tourist season.

 

[Miki]

[quote]Hi, My last word (probably ) I agree that in a very good area, with a very long season, it may be possible to live on CdH. I know nowhere in the Limoges area that is that good a location, nor one...[/quote]

Ian,

Having a fair knowledge of many people with B&B's, you are right.

The depts that do well enough to allow a family to live from the earnings of a B&B alone, are extremely small.

If the trend continues in the way it is now, "everyman and his dog" buying gîtes and chambre d'hôtes (notice my translation of the term )to live on, or to eek out their pensions, it will become harder and harder to live on the B&B alone.

It is in no way just the Brits though, we have had 5 French new chambre d'hôtes within 5 km's open this year, 3 with GDF and I wonder how long this trend will continue ? Hopefully long enough for us to sell in a few years time !!

[mascamps.com]

From my days as a tourist I second Ian's verdict on the Limoges area, at least if you want to live on the income from a CdH. A tiny bit too quiet a think but as Miki says there are a lot of places like that.

I'm not sure if it's a via way of selecting a place but looking at where there are lots of CdH/gites would highlight the areas where, presumably, they are successful. Although, you might be one CdH too many in a number of cases.

Miki, are those French CdH's being run along brit-owned lines or in laid-back French style? ie are they actually trying to make money out of it or just using in the original way of supplementing income?

Sure, if we can't sell up perhaps we can all appear on our own TV shows. They seem to be breeding almost as fast as the CdHs!

 

Arnold