It pays to choose your Pays

All French people – perhaps all people in France (perhaps all people) – belong to their “pays”, this is not just a geographical area, it is also their emotional and cultural inheritance. Homeland or Heartland may be closer to the meaning.

In France this is the result of many centuries of survival in a vast country with many climatic and geological variations. For centuries, until the early 20th century, France was in fact hundreds of small and mostly isolated communities, most with their own dialect and several totally different languages.

Today the 95 mainland departments all have different identities, but within these departments, every village and hamlet still has a recognisable character. This gives thousands of permutations of local identities, a sort of DNA of the terroire. Some are related, but two villages just a couple of miles apart can still seem to be from different planets.

These differences are not as acute today as they were even only twenty years ago – I first came to France in 1961, before there were any major Autoroutes, my friend Bob Mollison and I travelled from Calais, through Paris and down to the Mediterranean on a BSA Bantam. I remember then the differences of each stage of our journey with our maximum speed of 20 mph.

I am writing this not in response to questions I am often asked, about buying property in France – if you are looking for somewhere for your home or for a vacation property, the first place most look is the thousands of estate agent sites on the Internet – Google indicate about 11 million listings for France- in just about every case you will not be told on the information where the property is, or even be shown a picture of the front of the property – this is to avoid you finding out more about the property before the agent can suck you into their thrall, get you to sign a “Bon de Visite” – this is to ensure their five to seven percent commission.

There is no effective Multi Listing Service in France, no one central register of properties for sale – so to realise your dream of finding a place in France you are encouraged to go into the lobster-pot of the immobiliers door and spend many lost hours being shown piles of old stone and plastered over woodworm in places you never knew existed.

With luck you may see five properties a day this way – to have any idea of what is really on offer you would need years to search in this manner. Even then you will not be seeing even half of what is for sale – a large proportion (perhaps 50 percent) of properties are still sold direct or through the service of the Notaire (the Notaire is legally required to act for the sale of a property, they are the government tax collector on every single property sale).

To get some idea – in Herault, the department I live in, there are more estate-agents listed than bakers shops, about 1000 of the rascals, that is one estate agent for every 250 houses – at the most this means at any one time (taking the mobility of the population) an estate agent will, on average, have 8 properties on their books, but to be viable an agent needs about 200 properties listed – so from these figures a property will be listed with from five to thirty agents – which is why the adverts will not tell you where the property is until you sign guaranteeing their commission.

So how do you find the home of your dreams?

My advice is to come to France – travel round until you find the climate you want. Then travel in that region until you find the “pays” you are happy in – the best way to do this is to go to every town and have a coffee, or beer in every cafe. Buy a croissant in the local boulangerie, sit in the local park, or outside the Mairie – see if the “pays” is “sympa” to you. When you have found your “pays” talk to people, the Mairie, Notaire, boulangerie – put an advert in the bouangerie (those little tear off strips with a phone number on)

Look for your new home there – it will be there, certainly at the present time – I bet you a beer that if you say in a loudish voice in the cafe, “I wonder if there are any houses for sale in this town” – you will be told of several or a person that can help you, most of which are not yet in any agents grasp.